review

Title : Then We Came To The End

Author : Joshua Ferris

Price : SGD 17.66 (Bookweb Kinokuniya)

We thanked each other. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenous or ironic. We said things for getting things done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perferctly without gain or purpose but many meeting revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other (page 5)

With the decline of the dot-com era, layoffs are on everyone’s door, including a Chicago-based advertising company, where this novel is situated. Capturing the life of the employees in a *probably* typical american(if not all) corporations, bringing gossips, secret romance, stress, frequent breaks in a humorous way. It’s written in such details, if you’re a white collar worker, you’ll probably see yourself here and there, laughing and smiling at the gossips or pranks you probably have witnessed (or even involved in) on your work history.

Joshua Ferris successfully capture how workers think, reason, and feels at the same time. It may be based on an american company, yet I found his description familiar, even dead-on on some parts. There is Karen Woo, who is always ahead on gossip, there is the boss, Lynn Mason who has breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about (although it’s always be part of coffee-break gossip), there is Joe, that guy who never involve with anyone but surprisingly close to the boss. You have a colleague whose character you hate the most, you name it, this book have it .

A real entertainment.