Matias Celedon

I went into this looking for office/corporate horror. I suppose I got that, to a certain extent, but this turned out to be a much more artsy and experimental book than I had hoped for.

The book's gimmick is that it's written/produced using actual office stamps. As a result, each page usually only has about 1-4 short lines of text.

At the beginning, readers are told that this is being written by an office worker at the subsidiary, using only the stamps found around the office. On June 5, 2008, workers are told that there will be a power supply interruption between 8:30 AM and 8:00 PM and that they are to remain at their workstations. The doors are locked, and the phone lines are down. The power outage goes on for a good deal longer than planned, but things at the subsidiary become hellish for the women in only 24 hours, if I interpreted things correctly.

All characters were disabled in some way and were only referred to by their disabilities: the blind girl, the mute girl, the lame man, the one-eyed man, and the one-armed man. The narrator never spoke of himself in the third person, but he'd have been "the colorblind man." I got the impression that the narrator was forced to work for the subsidiary after being diagnosed with colorblindness, but the book's setup forced readers to do a lot of interpretation, so I could be wrong. For example, I disagree with those reviewers who thought that the dogs mentioned in the text were a literal pack of wild dogs running around in the building - I think it was a metaphor for the animalistic behavior of the workers.

While reading this, I was reminded of issue #6 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, "24 Hours," in which customers and employees in a diner become increasingly animalistic and brutal over the course of 24 hours. However, I felt that Gaiman did it better. Things became nasty pretty quickly in both stories, but in Gaiman's there was a solid reason for it. In The Subsidiary, the reason seemed to be "it's dark and people are scared," but that didn't work for me. In only 24 hours, the narrator was telling the deaf girl to pay for the candle he gave her with sex. After three days, the lame man captured a boy who, from the sounds of things, he periodically raped. (I assumed all instances of "girl" actually meant "woman," since the deaf girl was another employee, but the one instance of "boy" seemed to indicate an underage character, in which case the lame man was a pedophile.)

There were no mentions of any of the practicalities of trying to survive in a building where the power had been cut and the doors locked so that no one could leave - nothing about food, water, restrooms, etc. Instead, the text's entire focus was on the things the characters did to each other, which culminated in one character's death. I'm not sure what Celedón was aiming for, but it didn't work for me on any level.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (lisätietoja)

Stuck inside an office building with no power and no escape: a postmodern horror story. This glimpse underneath mundane office life is simultaneously absurd and eerie. Using only office supplies, Celedon, and his narrator, don't so much write a story as create impressions. Like the nameless characters themselves, the narrative is incomplete--damaged. The characters' colossal failures to connect in a humane way remind me of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 bureaucratic nightmare Memoirs Found In A Bathtub. Recommended lunchtime reading.… (lisätietoja)

You don't so much read a book like Matías Celedón's The Subsidiary as experience it, and what a mind-bending experience it is.

As the publisher explains, Celedón hand-designed his book using an old stamp set, individually typesetting the brief text of each page into a stamp and then stamping them himself into the pages of the book. Given its format, it's not surprising that the book's actual word count is very low. What is surprising is how much fear and paranoia Celedón manages to convey in those few words. The reader proceeds through the story with a clenched fist in the stomach, wondering whether the Subsidiary's employees are destined for the same fate as the "desaparecidos," the thousands of their Argentinean countrymen who disappeared during the Pinochet regime.

The book is set in June, 2008, some 35 years after Argentina's "Dirty War," leaving the reader to wonder whether the employees trapped at their work stations in the dark have been stranded by a new military coup (as the use of dogs suggests) or an equally sinister corporate takeover. Regardless of the cause, the employees rapidly lose their civilized facades, reduced to their broken essence: the deaf girl, the lame man, the one-armed man, the one-eyed man, the blind girl, the mute girl, and our unnamed narrator, who once was a bank teller but now stamps "the orders, the instructions, the mandates." But who issues the orders, what are the mandates? All we know is how the narrator describes his job: "I save people." And why are all of the Subsidiary's employees disabled?

"The one-eyed man remembers, screams: He sees them coming."

I read The Subsidiary in digital form on my computer, so I can only imagine how much more powerful it will be in its published hardbound form. Whether as a physical artifact or a work of literature, The Subsidiary is a true work of art.

I received a free copy of The Subsidiary from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.… (lisätietoja)