PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. (Both available from Open Letter.) He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Critics tend to compare his works to those of Balzac, Zola, Dos Passos, and Faulkner. Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish, including books by Ana Maria Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.
A strange book in the best sense of the word. This is not an ordinary novel, it will surprise many. --Rodrigo Fresan A discovery; an anti-utopian moral story with raw, carefully-crafted writing; among the best I've read in a long time. --Rosa Montero The precision of the writing is entwined with the author's visionary capacity. --Pere Gimferrer, member of the Premio Biblioteca Breve jury A book both powerful in what it tells and brilliant in what remains silent. --Menendez Salmon There's something about the book that is decidedly addictive, a real page-turner. --Yann Suty By inserting a cold, heartless but all-too-familiar corporate environment into an ultra-violent urban universe, The Clerk draws a chilling portrait of the savagery and difficulty to love that characterize contemporary society, and especially of alienation produced by bureaucracy. --Charybde 27 With spectral serenity, suggestive images, and outstanding stylistic coherence, Saccomanno ... unravels the story of a contemporary slave in only 55 chapters. --Die Welt Saccomanno has a superb command of horror. The Clerk is an existential expressionist blend of office novel and film noir. --Berliner Zeitung
