Customer Reviews

Personal Days: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Personal Days is both funny and clever - it can be enjoyed for its hilarious and familiar observations of contemporary office life absurdities and appreciated for Ed Park's witty writing style. It's the perfect literary companion to Dilbert, The Office, and Office Space.

The characters are sharply portrayed with satirical affection - reading the book was like starting a new job and meeting a new set of coworkers who could become one's friends or nemeses.

The plot is gripping and culminates in something rare in many of today's novels - an ending that is both satisfying and leaves one guessing.

I highly recommend Personal Days and look forward to more of Mr. Park's refreshing voice.

Personal Days is a funny and sardonic read, and while the laughs come quickly, at times somewhat painfully, in a good way, there is real intelligence to this book. The characters seem to be dashed off at first glance, but quickly you find that they feel real and complete, or at least as real and complete as any of the people in real life that we get to know in the same way: through quirky episodes and odd monikers and annoying or endearing tics. PD is a quick read, full of laughs, but take your time and you'll be rewarded.

I don't write many reviews.

I LOVE this book. At first I was reading it very quickly because it is so g-damn funny and is so fun to read. Then I read slower and slower until I was only allowing myself to read a few pages at a time because I really didn't want it to end. Just a brilliant piece of work--and not only are the sentences so good (jokes within jokes within jokes) but also the structure of the book is exciting and the overall movement of the plot is extremely interesting. It moves from a very light, funny, almost sitcom-like environment gradually to a very bleak, strange, lonely place, where each secure part is torn away, piece by piece, and a single last character is left, alone, calling out into what can only seen as apocolyptic gloom. Wow. My kind of book.

Take this hilarious, biting satire to work and sneak a read whenever you need reassurance that offices everywhere are as crazy as yours. In "Personal Days," employees at a New York firm bicker and squabble over everything from who should take responsibility for a paper-jam to who has dibs on the "limited-edition Japanese Post-its." In between, they gossip, consume loads of coffee and cigarettes and, when they have time, actually squeeze in some work. Occasionally, they're rewarded with a "deprotion, which is a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion." The Kafka-esque absurdities pile up. For instance, you never want gushing praise from the boss -- it's an unconscious sign, "like a poker player's tell," that the boss is mentally preparing himself or herself to give you the pink slip. And after all the laughs, writer Ed Park knows just when to get profound and touching on us. His book bursts with creativity -- at times too much of it. Indeed, if there's any complaint at all, it's that "Personal Days" is another of those books that plays with typesetting and fonts and gimmicks. The last section is a 50-page, one-sentence rant. On the plus side, you won't mind working overtime so you can finish reading it in one sitting.

...(hope!) that it would be an amusing tale of modern life in the office. And it was just that as I was reading Part I of the book. Amusing and interesting enough to hold my interest while not exactly certain who was who among the collected characters whose story was being related by means of the first-person plural point-of-view, an interesting narrative sleight of hand by the author. But when I kept hitting various laugh-out-loud parts I realized I was onto something else.

Part II is rendered by means of a classification system somewhat along the lines of a legal code or contract which I found to be fascinating in its own way, although some readers probably won't care for it. Whatever. The story flows along with or without it. The high point of Part II consists of a piece of found literature--a handwritten notebook containing observations, aphorisms, and other pearls of wisdom gleaned from the collected texts of a number of high priests and practitioners of the business arts. One bombastic absurdity is piled upon another.

Part III of the novel consists of a single Joycean sentence written by one of the principal characters (the period key on his laptop is broken) while trapped in an elevator. This section clarifies and illumines much of what came before. The story then continues to build to a quite surprising climax.

Personal Days is the first novel I've read in quite some time, or ever, that when I was finished I immediately turned back to the first page and began re-reading. It was even more enjoyable the second time through.

Beyond the laughs and the literary pyrotechnics, Park has woven a serious theme into Personal Days with the use of the leitmotif phrase "Where does the time go? Where does the life go?" When someone in the office declares "I can't believe it's almost November!" the person has to be told it already is November and there is in fact only one more week until December. When someone else observes that the current winter isn't so bad compared to last year, it takes his colleagues a moment to realize he's referring to the temperature. Besides, "how many people really remembered what last year's winter was like?" Cold, wet, windy, snow followed by slush. "Winter is winter." And two winters ago? Only the dimmest of collective memories. "Where does the time go? Where does the life go?"

People lose their jobs and are never heard from again in a manner similar to the the dying TB patients of the Berghorf Sanitorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain who stop showing up for dinner. But Ed Park is not the lugubrious Teutonic. He is a student of Charles Portis about whom he wrote a fine essay for "The Believer" magazine. His close observations, precise language, and deadpan wit pay homage to the master.

The first thing you need to know is that this is a story about a small group of young, whiny, white-collar, Manhattan employees of some generic giant corporation based in Omaha. None of the characters are developed in any manner beyond some jaunty nicknames and a few personal tics, peeves, and obsessions, so if you like to read about fleshed-out "real" characters, move on. Next, you need to know that it's a black comedy about corporate downsizing and the shallow communities formed by coworkers. If that doesn't sound interesting, then move on. (Caveat: If it does sounds interesting and you've already read Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, you may be disappointed by how much of the same territory is covered...) Finally, you need to know that it's structured somewhat awkwardly. Both the first and second sections unfold in paragraph-sized scenes or vignettes. However, the first section is written in the first person, while the second section is written in a more distancing third person. Then the third section is a 45-page run-on sentence email from one of the peripheral characters to another. This all feels rather gimmicky and unnecessary, so if you like your narratives served "regular," move on.

Anyway, the book kicks off with a handful of workers amidst an ocean of empty cubicles, as "the firings" have decimated their ranks. Their main concern is "who's next?" -- a topic they pick at like a scab, huddled over desks, in emails, and at happy hours. Confusing their speculation is that there are several layers of management, and no one is really sure how the hierarchy works. Not to mention the suspicion that one of the managers must be a spy for their new owners in California. Alas, these survivors are so empty of any personality that it's hard to get too invested in whether or they get fired. It's all so deadpan and absurdist that there's no dramatic tension whatsoever.

Which is not to say it's bad, it's just not that engaging. To be sure, there are a lot of lines and scenes that are individually funny, and Park's got some seriously dry wit in a kind of McSweeny's-meets-Wodehouse sense. There are plenty of quotable passages I think my favorite is from page 99: "Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in face for any season or situation, with the possible exception of world domination. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key.One area involved fur."

Ultimately, I think it's fair to compare this somewhat slight book to other classics of cubicle humor -- so long as the comparison goes something like this: Personal Days < Then We Came to the End < The Office (US) < Dilbert< The Office - The Complete Collection BBC Edition (UK) < Office Space.

This book was absolutely hilarious and kept me going page-by-page until the end. The characters were great, memorable, and the little inside jokes that developed through the book were endearing.

For anyone who liked "e" or is currently watching The Office or loves Office Space, or into british humour in general, I think you'll really dig this short comedic masterpiece.

LOVED this book after picking it up a few years ago. hilarious and haunting look at workplace politics... found myself thinking about it lately and how it relates to the current state of paranoia at work. i'm gonna read it again now and pass it along to my coworkers! whether or not you work in an office, you should read this book.

Highly entertaining read. Anyone who works (or has worked) in an office can absolutely relate.

Not at the top of its genre, but fun to read--especially if you work in a cubicle in the bowels of a large impersonal organization.