The Clerk - by Guillermo Saccomanno (Paperback)

About the Book

" Love, sex, and corporate slavery in a futuristic world from the two-time winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Perfectly normal men and women head to their desks every day in a city laid waste by guerrilla incursions, menaced by hordes of starving people, murderous children and cloned dogs, patrolled by armed helicopters, and plagued with acid rain. Among them is an office worker willing to be humiliated in order to keep his job--until he falls in love and allows himself to dream of someone else.

To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream? The Clerk tells a story that happened yesterday, but still hasn't happened, and yet is happening now. And we didn't even notice, too tied up in our jobs, our salaries, our appearances. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dostoyevsky.

Review Quotes

"A strange book in the best sense of the word. This is not an ordinary novel, it will surprise many."--Rodrigo Fresán

"A discovery; an anti-utopian moral story with raw, carefully-crafted writing; among the best I've read in a long time."--Rosa Montero

"The precision of the writing is entwined with the author's visionary capacity."--Pere Gimferrer, member of the Premio Biblioteca Breve jury

"A book both powerful in what it tells and brilliant in what remains silent."--Menéndez Salmón

"There's something about the book that is decidedly addictive, a real page-turner."--Yann Suty

"By inserting a cold, heartless but all-too-familiar corporate environment into an ultra-violent urban universe, The Clerk draws a chilling portrait of the savagery and difficulty to love that characterize contemporary society, and especially of alienation produced by bureaucracy."--Charybde 27

"With spectral serenity, suggestive images, and outstanding stylistic coherence, Saccomanno ... unravels the story of a contemporary slave in only 55 chapters."--Die Welt

"Saccomanno has a superb command of horror. The Clerk is an existential expressionist blend of office novel and film noir."--Berliner Zeitung

About the Author

Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. (Both available from Open Letter.) He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Critics tend to compare his works to those of Balzac, Zola, Dos Passos, and Faulkner.

Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish, including books by Ana María Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.