A brilliantly pared-down take on what it means to be employed by a bank, which expresses the alienation and monotony experienced by staff and customers alike, as well as its opaque mechanisms that defy human rationalism. There is both bleakness and wit in this brief but extraordinary novel.
The bank. The bank is greyness and the monotony of modern working practices. The bank is modernity and its obsession with moving money around. The bank is perverse and its mechanisms unknown even to those who work there. The bank is a place where an employee can go quietly insane in the bowels of the building. The bank is an inhumane human creation, a monster whose needs do not coincide with those of its customers and employees. The bank is extraordinary, a metaphysical entity that cannot be understood or explained …Except perhaps through the equally extraordinary pared-down prose of Magnus Florin, a writer who explains through suggestiveness the inscrutable paradoxes of the way we live now. In spite of their brevity, Florin’s books are novels and not novellas because, like the Tardis, when you enter them you enter a much wider space than you expected. They suggest a myriad of ideas, and you are left guessing where he is going to take you next.