Review:
This book is set up as though it were a series of statements taken from a group of employees working with and around a variety of artifacts and occasionally visiting a nearby planet. (I think - it's been a while since I read this, and my memories are fuzzy.) The statements were taken over a period of 18 months, after which the committee assigned to evaluate the employees came to a decision about their overall fate. Some of the employees were human, while others were humanoid (human, but created artificially?).
This had gotten several good reviews and sounded intriguing, but, as someone who doesn't have a good track record with "literary fiction," I was a bit hesitant to try it. I should have listened to my gut. The story was fragmented to the point of making it difficult to tell what was going on. The statements were one-sided - we only saw what the employees said, not what they were asked, and no other context was given. None of the statements were tagged with names or other identifiers - there were bits of info that indicated some of them were made by the same people, but there wasn't enough there to truly follow along with any particular "character."
The author's dedication mentions that the book was heavily inspired by Lea Guldditte Hestelund's installations and sculptures, so I googled the artist and her works. Several of them were exactly the artifacts Ravn described the employees tending to and interacting with, although the actual sculptures didn't resonate with me as much as Ravn's descriptions of them did.
All in all, this was a weird, intriguing, and ultimately frustrating read. I'd probably have enjoyed it more if it had been a little less abstract.
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