Paperback, 96 pages
Published March 16, 2017 by Verso.
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office?
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?
Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute …
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office?
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?
Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.
This is a 1968 novel by Oulipian Georges Perec. It was authored based on a flow chart (included with the book) and it's in the category of "random walk" style generated novels, with lots of repeated looping sections. It's kind of a slog to read but it's a really cool example of some early generative fiction.
This is either an amazing litereary achievement or it isn’t it’s one or t’other but let’s just assume to keep things simple – for we must do our best to keep things simple – that it is a work of art where perec demonstrates a unique ability to think like a computer so far ahead of his time and let’s not forget a marvellous translation by david bellos but what if it isn’t an amazing book in which case you circumperambulate to the beginning of this review and
