The Employee

by Jacques Sternberg, Matt Seidel (Translator)

A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. A banal opening—echoing a banal title—that immediately launches into a frenetic narrative that gallops across genres, modes, and galaxies.

From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, multiple fathers, and a perishing supply of siblings, to his early development of a third arm and a second, jawless, head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as cherry-tree prisoner, voraciously unlucky lover, dead man, larva, traveling salesman of inutility, murder suspect, and many other employments, including that of ladder-descending bureaucrat and department-store wrapper. Years pass, return, and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime against the laws of time and space, and the inescapable rigidity of family, work, society, and—ultimately—the mind.

First published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was the recipient of the Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents a ferocious, vertiginous, entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.

Genres: France, Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This obscure 1958 French novel, just released in English for the first time by Wakefield Press, is a hard one to describe, as it seemingly takes place entirely within the head of our narrator as he’s waiting outside his boss’s office. It’s almost purely nonsense, though pretty hilarious at times, and each paragraph often barely relates to the one before. He recounts his imaginary/dream-life, growing up among four hundred brothers and sisters (and the same amount of fathers), growing extra limbs, his time spent imprisoned in a tree, living as a dead man, exploring the galaxy, etc. all within a handful of pages. Here’s a typical example:

“These innocent games concluded when I lost my two wings. Gaunt, weakened, I changed from the butterfly I once was into a larva, then a cocoon. For the most part, I was left out in the garden, where I would target the trees. It was a cherry tree that snagged me in its sap and swallowed me.

For several years I was this tree, which one month turned into a poplar. It was even claimed that it produced oranges one year, then orangeades. But I think things got exaggerated. I remember very little from this time: most trees don’t think much. I could have lived like that, larval and unconscious, for centuries, had my father not gotten the idea to buy a small war secondhand, which he unleashed in our garden. A mortar shell struck down the tree that swallowed me. Thus did my parents rediscover me, fully grown but healthy and safe.

So great was their disappointment that it brought about a flood…” (p. 9)

It’s quite fun in small doses, but can become a bit wearying after a while. So much ridiculous shit is constantly happening that sometimes a few pages would go by and I’d realize that I somehow missed (or forgot) that the narrator’s apartment is traveling through the air like a plane or that the “organage” he entered is now a bathroom in the middle of the sea. It’s too much. Reading just a few pages here and there is the way to go, at least for me. It’s exceedingly absurd but extremely clever at times. And about as surreal and imaginative as it gets.

[Nesellanum · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a relentless onslaught of brilliant absurdity, kaleidoscopic mayhem, and hallucinatory juxtapositions. Somehow, it remains rooted to a foundation of quotidian experiences and events, which provides a welcome reference point, but quickly wanders off into mind-bending scenarios and environments, weaving through psychedelic vignettes that defy the limits of imagination both in creativity and volume.

I'm in awe of how Sternberg was able to construct such an avant-garde masterpiece, and the way in which it flows is just breathtaking - never laborious, never dull - simply built to perfection. The Employee defies the boundaries of genres, and at times is incredibly humorous. The core is chaos, but it's exquisitely beautiful chaos. Just the type of insanity I adore.

Intensely original and immensely enjoyable. I'd consider this a masterpiece of surrealistic literature. Cannot wait to read more of his work.

[Ewoud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ik dacht dat ik alles gelezen had. Toen las ik Sternberg. Zelden een schrijver tegengekomen met zoveel fantasie. Zelden zo'n virtuoze aaneenschakeling gelezen van hyperbolen, paradoxen en inversies. Sternberg werd in Antwerpen geboren in een Russisch-Joodse familie en publiceerde deze surrealistische roman in 1958 bij Éditions de Minuit, waar destijds ook ronkende namen als Samuel Beckett en Alain Robbe-Grillet uitgegeven werden. Vandaag te vinden in de Franstalig-Belgische Espace Nord reeks. In L'employé dwaalt de ik-verteller rond in de absurde wereld van de moderne stad (appartementsgebouwen, winkelcentra, kantoren), waar alles voortdurend op losse schroeven staat: de ruimte, de tijd, de logica, zijn eigen identiteit. Liefhebbers van het groteske proza van Gust Gils, C.C. Krijgelmans of Harry Vaandrager zullen hiervan smullen. Zonde dat dit niet in het Nederlands vertaald is. Kan iemand hier alsjeblieft verandering in brengen?

[PK Lawton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nameless employee, five minutes late for work, embarks on a frenetic, genre-defying internal monologue about his life, exploring the conflict between an unrestrained imagination and the rigid confines of society.

I’ve read a few works from French authors in translation this year, and I've disliked all of them, The Employee included. I also generally tolerate surrealist writing in small doses (less and less as I age), but the endless barrage of, uhhh, complete bullshit inside the employee's mind left me cold. No comparison to the surrealist visions in Solenoid, The Employee is like someone you don’t like telling you about a stupid dream they had.

Maybe that's the point? The narrative is intentionally baffling and overwhelming. The goal is to bewilder and exhaust the reader, leaving us "bewildered and breathless" (per the blurb).

Well, mission accomplished.

[Kaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Nothing ever happens on a Monday. Emerging from the warm, black cocoon of sleep, I pass into the pale cocoon of day. It's almost like moving from a world of down feathers to a realm of mud. I shiver as I dress, and feel like I'm putting on dead branches and trash.’

A scorching critique of capitalism wherein Sternberg charges into the surreal to describe the commodification and depersonalisation inherent to a system where nothing is ever enough or correct. Every step taken to exist, to succeed, to reap due benefits, its blown out, stretching beyond its capabilities and form, until it is unrecognisable, mimicking the myth of infinite growth here the worker, the capitalist, the good Frenchman, evolved beyond evolution until the very fabric of reality frays into absurdity:

‘I’m in danger of living or dying… It’s a matter of life and death.’

[KHLOARIS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epic stream-of-consciousness autobiography going from campy sci-fi to surrealist hallucinations on every page. Told in the first person, it all begins when a family of a 100+ identical clones loose their cool and start murdering each other at the dinner table. By the end of the first chapter our protagonist, Jacques Sternberg himself, has died. But he gradually re-assembles atom by atom, enters his adulthood (living out his teens as a fish) before finally settling down to a desk job in the city as a corporate stooge. By the end of the book we’ve followed him to this lonely planet, wondering its deserts & jungles while searching for the source of an omniscient disembodied voice repeatedly echoing from somewhere over the horizon: “Sale on lady’s undergarments, forth floor!”. Boris Vian could hardly have imagined a finer homage to himself. Jacques Sternberg started his sci-fi streak with the short story, How's Business? (1957) in which he provides a coherent account of how the discovery of a planet entirely made of foam bubbles will affect global business markets on Earth.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non-stop nonsense. Like an Ionesco* play, or a Monty Python skit, or a dream that keeps getting weirder and weirder. I love it, but enjoy it more in short doses. Like the more whimsical side of Boris Vian.

The most fun part of this book is the section where the narrator finds himself trapped in a surrealistic shopping mall. Exit is free with a large enough purchase.

The only other Sternberg I'd read was a wonderful novella in Continuum: French Science Fiction Short Stories. This book is nothing at all like that story which is an unrelentingly gloomy tale of an alien being slowly bored to death by life on Earth.

I look forward to reading more from Sternberg, though not much is easy to find.

* The novel even name-checks one of Ionesco's plays.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

So you like weird books? Growing and shedding limbs at random, locations and sizes shift between sentences, fictional words. For fans of Jarry, Abe, Ohle, Ajvaz, Kavan, and Cisco.

“My days are worthless, no matter which end I start from.”

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome, but not an easy, read. Each chapter is a separate experiment, brimming with new worlds and ideas, maddening and dizzying and frustratingly beautiful.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

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