“We want to confess, and you’re going to be our confessional. We want to write our testament, and you’re going to be our notaries. We want to say goodbye, and you’re going to be our next of kin.”

Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’ has lines like the one above that are so beautiful and bleak and sad, but then there are other lines like Statement 18’s, “What are cookies?” And you start to laugh uncontrollably on the train, cause like wtf, but then you’re brought back into the story. Because they aren’t really asking, “what are cookies?” They are asking a question, which we as humans have never had to ask, something a humanoid can only ask. ‘The Employees’ is a collection of statements from the human and humanoid crew of the Six Thousand Ship. They talk about what they do all day. Some do laundry, other’s cook, some are funeral directors, etc. But then there comes a day when the crew picks up these weird objects from the planet New Discovery. They never explicitly tell us what these objects are. They just describe them. Some hate them, some love them. Some have sexual feelings towards them. Some don’t care about them. And some see them as their children, which the expedition to New Discovery has separated them from.

I would highly recommend this book. It’s funny as fuck sometimes and sad as fuck sometimes. It’s interesting because there are moments that feel so human from the humanoids. For example, this one also from statement 18, “All I want is to be assimilated into a collective, human community where someone braids my hair with flowers and white curtains sway in a warm breeze.” Statement 18 has to be one of my favorites.

Seriously couldn’t put this book down, but I was forced to because of society!

Now I have to ask myself, What are cookies?