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Then We Came to the End: Joshua Ferris Paperback – 4 Jan. 2008
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A HILARIOUS SATIRE THAT SHOWS OFFICE DYNAMICS AT THEIR MOST PETTY AND PROFOUND FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR, JOSHUA FERRIS
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues.
There's Chris, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine.
*Joshua Ferris' mind-blowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to pre-order now.*
'Very funny, intense and exhilarating . . . For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work' The Times
'As dazzling as Franzen's The Corrections and as confident as Tartt's The Secret History . . . Exceptional, very funny' Daily Telegraph
'Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris's cracking debut has modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal world' Daily Mail
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date4 Jan. 2008
- Dimensions19.8 x 12.9 x 2.4 cm
- ISBN-109780141027630
- ISBN-13978-0141027630
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Review
As impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections . . . Exceptional, funny, radical ― Telegraph
Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate ― Observer
From the Back Cover
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues.
There's Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine.
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0141027630
- Publisher : Penguin; 1st edition (4 Jan. 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780141027630
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141027630
- Dimensions : 19.8 x 12.9 x 2.4 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 318,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,071 in Satires
- 1,221 in Doctors & Medicine Humour
- 1,267 in Parodies (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Joshua Ferris's first novel, "Then We Came to the End," won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review. He lives in New York.
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Top reviews from United Kingdom
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There are more characters than in Romeo & Juliet – which is quite possibly why the families in that play get a mention. There are more characters than in a Wagner opera, and in some ways the narrative is is both Shakespeare and Wagner. I almost forgot Ralph - that’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and transcendentalist. He’s not one of the cast, but his philosophy - that you don’t need to search for the truth because it will reveal itself intuitively through nature - is ever present.
‘Funny,’ ‘hilarious’, ‘entertaining,’ the epithets from the usual suspects are misleading and they should examine their motives for saying so. The beauty of being an amateur reviewer on Amazon is that one has no axe to grind.. I can almost guarantee you will laugh, but the novel is sad, painful, wistful. There is cancer, the abduction and murder of a child, the celebration of dullness and uniformity, physical and mental breakdowns, eccentricity and despair. There are multiple lay-offs (described as 'being made to walk Spanish down the hall'). There are multiple swivel chairs with concealed serial numbers, multiple floors with highly static carpets, and 'a circuitous blueprint of cubicle clusters'. It’s Wagnerian, it’s Shakespearian, and it’s experienced by ‘you and me.’
I worked in an office for quite a few years, and found that this story captured the atmosphere of office life quite brilliantly. It is funny in places, not always laugh out loud but often in a subtle manner, and it is also quite poignant and sad. It is a brilliant piece on how lots of different personalites cope when lumped in to working together. I can recognise some of the characters (maybe not so extreme) from my own former workplace!
Maybe you have to have worked in an office environment to fully "get" this story, but for me it really hit the spot, and I have returned to read it again on more than one occasion. In fact I miss working in an office and reading this makes me nostalgic! (Yes, there are worse jobs out there, be grateful for your ergonomic chair, desk and "buck cases" - read it and you'll understand the reference!)
The characters are the driving force of Ferris' work as until the end not much happens. The characters are fantastic though, you have Marcia Dwyer who has hair from the 80's; Tom Mota who does not leave when sacked; Larry and Amber having an affair; Lynn Mason dying from Cancer and Joe Pope who nobody really knows anything about.
Ferris has captured perfectly office life and the inevitable office politics that comes with it. As I was reading I could identify with so much of it; the meetings about meetings, the pointless e mails; being territorial about your stationary and working alongside people all day but not really knowing them. The events that do happen in the book are gradually built up and serve different purposes. How people behave at work is often a result of what is happening in their personal lives but often at work we do not take the time to find out what your colleague does when they leave the office at night. Ferris also explores through the character of Lynn Mason the fine line between colleague and friend. When her employees find out that she is ill they struggle to decide what to do; should they just ignore that they know or can they rally round and show their support?
I think that Joshua Ferris' book will have anyone that has ever worked in an office nodding in agreement as they read and identifying with the mundanity of work. However for anyone that has luckily not had an office job I am really not sure if they would get it but maybe that's the author's point?
I thought it was clever and different, but not only that - I thought it had plenty of heart and enough story for me too. Also, it's so hard to write about corporate life - I've seen many try and fail but Ferris pulls it off in my view. Perhaps you need to have worked in a corporation for it to chime as much as it did with me.
But I don't want to big it up so much that you don't like it.
Oh, and though there's black comedy I wouldn't choose it as a comic read - the blurb is a bit misleading.
Top reviews from other countries
The premise is solid, entirely relatable, grounded and funny. An interlude in the middle breaks up the story, it is extremely poignantly written and as much as it feels out of place in a simple story of an office workforce, it is the glue that ties the whole story together. Just like working at a new office, you slowly learn the individual characters and their quirks and personas.
Unless you turn your nose up at stylistic choices like a first person plural narrator, then you should give this a try.
Un des meilleurs livres que j'ai lu depuis longtemps (traduit en français sous le titre "Open Space") mais dans un anglais relativement accessible (même si le vocabulaire est parfois assez riche).
Like most books (or other forms of mass media for that matter) focusing on the nuances of the working world, this one goes the comedic route. Reading through the first chapter, you get a vivid sense of where Joshua is going. The main characters were introduced and the overall tone was established. It is then that the humor kicks in.
But it isn't the kind of humor that hits you as screwball or outrageous, the origin of the humor stems from the fact that every single one of these characters are caricatures of ourselves and of people we have perhaps met in our very own work spaces. That, to me, was what made the book funny. Work life, especially in commercial companies like the anonymous advertising firm described in this book, is funny in its very nature. The embarrassment of having your personal quirks on display for your fellow professionals to see, as is the urge to laugh at exhibitions of the same, constitutes much of the material in this book.
Compounded with a good sense of structure, a wondrously modern prose voice and a deep feel for the characters, the story captivates you and brings you to a place of identification with both the characters and the situations they find themselves in. It is this sympathy that provokes us to turn the pages, even though at times we wonder where the plot may be taking us. But it does payoff in the end with no small measure of satisfaction.
The satisfaction I get from this book cannot be understated, or overstated. It has given me glimpses of myriad memories from my own working life. Sometimes, in life, we get caught up in our career and overlook the relationships of the colleagues we see day in, day out within the cul-de-sacs. This book does have that déjà-vu magic. And above all, it succeeds as an enjoyable piece of literature. Few books nowadays can claim to do that.
リストラが進行中で、次々に社員がクビになっていく。
全編を通してリストラの模様が語られているにもかかわらず、
読んでいて楽しいのは、会社で働く楽しみを追体験できるからだろう。
その楽しみは専ら、同僚のあれこれをゴシップするところから来る。
同僚のオフィスに入り込んで、ぺちゃくちゃぺちゃくちゃ、おしゃべり。
(この広告会社の生産性はかなり低そう。)
亡くなって、同僚にトーテムポールを遺す社員がいたり、
鬱病であることを認めたくなくて、
同僚の部屋から抗鬱剤を盗んで服用している社員がいたり。
どの社員も個性的で、楽しいエピソードを提供している。
(これ以上紹介すると、ネタバレが過ぎるので、2人だけに留める)
よくペーパーバックの裏表紙に書評の引用が掲げられていて、
hilariousと書かれているが、納得できたことはなかった。
しかし、本書は初めて確かにhilariousだ!と得心できた。
いままで読んできたペーパーバックの中で、最高に楽しかった。
活字が小さくて、ページ数も多かったせいか
(語彙もなかなか難しかったような気がする)、
読むのにけっこう時間がかかったが、毎日読むのが楽しみで仕方なかった。
登場人物の数が多いので、誰が誰なのかメモしながら読んだ方がよいかも知れない。