The Employees

2 hrs. 31 min.

Language Russian

Author Olga Ravn

Narrator Yulia Stepanova

Description

Booker Prize shortlist.

Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris” meets Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon.”

On board the ship “Six Thousand,” where the heroes live, mysterious events occur. The crew, consisting of people and humanoids, works together, performing routine tasks.

By the time we receive the onboard journal, something irreparable has happened. The crew takes aboard several strange objects from the planet New Discovery. The objects cause “persistent deviations” among the employees. Built as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s prose is an attempt to understand what happened.

“Personnel” explores what it means to be human emotionally and ontologically, while at the same time criticizing the life managed by work and performance logic.