Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

  This review is a hard one. I think Discontent by Beatriz Serrano captures a very specific experience and distinct voice. Specifically, the novel’s protagonist Marisa embodies the directionless ennui of modern corporate life. She’s a marketing creative crushed by the lifelessness of the workplace and is cynical about all of her coworkers and the whole “being employed” thing. She has Master’s students that look up to her, from whom she pilfers ideas and treats with disdain as they scramble for scraps of praise. She skips out for hours at lunch time to go to museums. She dreads the company retreat and greens out in order to avoid a team-building paintball game.

Serrano’s writing is competent. Other than some suspension of disbelief issues towards the end and a couple of structural issues, I don’t have any major issues with the writing itself. It’s descriptive and it’s tonally consistent. The dialogue rings as plausibly true. There’s a sarcasm to the narrator’s voice that delivers some engaging quips, my favourite of which being a reflection on a Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: “Bosch is off somewhere fucking a hydrangea, and I’m checking my work e-mail” (26). The main character is irreverent and potentially likeable.

Here’s my issue, though: it’s hard to elevate corporate ennui into an edifying artistic experience. Marisa is relatable, but her experiences aren’t particularly distinct. She goes home and watches YouTube videos while she eats dinner; she tweets and retweets causes she supports and overthinks her online presence; she has friends with whom she falls out of touch and then creeps on social medial; she has a neighbour with whom she has sex and has an unspoken intimacy; she does as little as possible for work and has that kind of existential ennui over major life decisions. The trouble with writing something so true-to-life is that it leaves the question: is this kind of existence worthy of being art? Serrano describes YouTube videos that I’ve seen; do I need to watch a fictional character watch a YouTube video? Does that just replicate my own boredom and doomscrolling? A similar issue that plagues the works of Douglas Coupland: it is so referential, so allusive, so intense in its pursuit of realism that it keeps me rooted in the banality of the world and runs the risk of getting dated quickly.

The novel is more or less a series of vignettes, loosely tied together with the looming work conference. One chapter is devoted to Marisa’s trip to the Bosch exhibit. One chapter outlines her relationship with her neighbour and their intimate routines. One chapter sees Marisa encounter an old friend with whom she’d fallen out of touch; the two immediately reconnect and have a drunken night on the town that actually establishes one of the book’s few tender moments. Marisa’s friend Elena serves as an interesting contrast to her. Elena has constructed a new self, while Marisa feels trapped. Elena has the freedom to pursue art, essentially by getting a boob job and playing up her sexuality to get men to pay for her life, while Marisa is floundering creatively. 

Marisa’s encounter with Elena compels her to finally open a box of artifacts left behind following the likely suicide of her coworker Rita. That’s another thread that runs throughout the book: this spectre of Rita. Marisa describes a connection with this other cynical employee, who looms as what Marisa might become. When Marisa opens the box, it’s revealed that Rita had a notebook on which she made artistic renderings of her coworkers, including one that doesn’t seem particularly flattering of Marisa. I’m not sure the payoff really happens for that—but also, I suppose that’s like life; sometimes we’re adrift and there isn’t really much of a narrative payoff.

That being said, the book does have a narrative culmination at the work retreat. Serrano really takes Marisa in a dark direction at the climax. At the best of times, Marisa isn’t particularly likable and this is where the book really took a turn for me. Marisa has a quick hookup with a paintball employee. Okay, whatever, I guess her and her boyfriend aren’t official. Then, she’s put on the spot to deliver a presentation about creativity. In a panic, Marisa decides that her plan is to drug all of her coworkers. She mixes MDMA into all of their lemonade and not only did it make her irredeemably insufferable to me, but it also stretched the limits of the plausibility. Would a generally normal but disaffected employee go that far?

That takes us through the first section of the book, which struck me as a surprise because we only had 20 pages left to go. This is where the structural problem emerges for me a little bit. Section two is about 15 pages. Section 3 is about 7 pages. This might come back to the ‘true-to-life’ aspect of the book; we have loose threads, tacked on vignettes, little experiments.

Even so, the second section of the book is actually kind of fun, if implausible. It’s a series of e-mails sent by the company to its different teams. As it turns out, someone who got drugged had to be hospitalized, and now there’s an investigation. The e-mails discussing the specifics keeps popping up and Marisa’s out of office autoresponse keeps popping up. It’s kind of funny because the conversation then also brings up the discussion of taking Marisa off the e-mail so that her out of office e-mail stops coming through.

The final section is an epilogue of sorts. It’s a description of what happened to Marisa when she returned from her vacation. I won’t spoil the specifics, but something pretty horrific happens. There was a set-up for it, so it feels like a reasonable payoff, but it comes across maybe more comedic or lighthearted than I was prepared for it to be. It rings a little false; the closing lines, in particular, offer a saccharine and overly clean reflection that makes all of our boredom and existential doubt seem trivial. Marisa narrates. “I’ve figured it out. In the end, all we need in life is someone who loves us, a bed with nice big pillows, a  few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something” (177). It seems like Marisa reverts to conventionality—a response to the horror of banal routines that itself lacks imagination. The ending just doesn’t quite hit.

Overall, I didn’t mind Discontent. It’s worth a quick read, but I’m not sure it really elevates our boring everyday lives into something more worthwhile. I’ve read some conflicting views on this one; some people praise the humour and relatability of the book and how perfect it is for describing corporate life. Others have a much more negative view of Marisa and the tone of the text. Let’s just say it’s messy.

Happy reading!

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!

Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe

  Sarah Jaffe’s title should serve as both a grim reminder and a rallying cry for living differently: Work Won’t Love You Back. You can likely infer Jaffe’s central conceit already: we invest love into our jobs, which are increasingly exploitative. The introduction to the book and its conclusion offer its framework, which is somewhat complex. Essentially, capitalism degrades human interaction (consider how many times, for example, you have not seen family or friends because you have too much work to do or because you’re too exhausted from the week, etc. or how many times you’re meeting with a friend in a brief, transactional way localized around a coffee shop.) In response, we’re encouraged to find meaning in our work, rather than seeing it as purely transactional. This creates a context in which we must love our work, and that love paves the way for our own exploitation: we are willing to sacrifice our well-being because we misplace our love.

The argument felt resonant and reminded me of a line from Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel Factotum that has lingered with me since I read it: “it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” It’s a miserable double bind: either hate your job and live miserably most of the time or love your job and sacrifice your other loves to it, pursuing what you find meaningful. Jaffe is looking for an alternative.

I have to admit that I felt a little let down by Work Won’t Love You Back and that it’s almost definitely my fault. I built it up in my head that the book would teach me how to solve my unhealthy relationship with work, but the book is less of a self-help manual and more of a catalogue of how different types of workers are exploited. To Jaffe’s credit, there are a lot of well-researched case studies that trace a clear historical throughline. She offers incisive commentary on a range of industries and documents the labour movements that tried to change things.

When I consider some of the highlight chapters, of course I was geared up for the one about teaching. I was hoping for some more guidance on how to navigate the exploitation of teachers, although the chapter seemed to reignite some of my frustrations rather than offer me a clear solution. I should mention, at least, that the point is not to aim for individual action and to further burden strained employees—only collective action can help to restructure the conditions that exploit us. Perhaps because I have less experience in the field, I was more interested in the parallel chapter about academia. Considering the wages, publication “opportunities”, and unpaid labour that goes into research and higher level teaching, that chapter seemed a natural outgrowth of the teaching one and I found it pretty illuminating.

Another chapter that really spoke to me is the one about art. Arguably, artists are some of the most exploited workers out there. Everyone assumes that artists create out of love (indeed, all artwork is deep down a desire to express and connect with others). Since we all hold the fundamental belief that creating art is enriching to the human spirit, we typically do not see art as being something deserving of financial recompense. Think of all the times artists are paid “in exposure.” The chapter does wonders to expose how much labour goes into creating artwork and how little recompense it receives.

Work Won’t Love You Back leads to two chapters that are more explicitly focused on work-as-play. There is a chapter about the tech industry, where employees at video game companies are expected to put up with insane crunch hours because they have ‘fun’ jobs. Video game testers are sometimes paid by-the-bug, meaning that they might play games for hours with no remuneration. Jaffe mentions, also, the rampant sexism and racism in the gaming industry (as with other fields of work, and with women in particular bearing the brunt of sexist wages). Similarly, the final chapter discusses the unpaid work of athletes—with women athletes in particular maybe earning 20-30k while their male counterparts get high six figure salaries. She discusses the lack of pay—and often lack of education—for college athletes while their owners degrade and profit from them (at least one Black player drawing the parallel to the slave trade). All the while, sports workers trying to advocate for better treatment are routinely punished by management.

All this to say, Jaffe offers a clear overview of how different industries rely on our love of work to exploit us and how that love ought to be redirected to more meaningful forms of connection—-to our actual families, our actual friends. When we have a lack of love, we are more susceptible to the wiles of capitalism—more likely to spend, to accept worse for ourselves, and so on. When our main source of love is our own love of work, we will continue to let work crush us.

So: Work Won’t Love You Back. It’s time to take a step back and find love for ourselves.

Happy reading!

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

    Shortlisted for 2025’s International Booker Prize, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection has rightly gotten a fair amount of attention from avid readers. Between the premise and style of the book, there is a lot to like. Perfection is about two expats living as creatives in Berlin, creating templates for websites or doing graphic design work for other creatives. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin. We get a chapter, for instance, about what their apartment looks like. We get a chapter about their work. A chapter on what they do for fun. A chapter on their sex lives. Then, the final few chapters see their friends leaving Berlin and, feeling creeping ennui, sees them leaving Berlin for lackluster-to-dreadful experiences in Portugal and Sicily before Anna’s uncle dies and them establishing a hotel from his property.

    Character-wise, the book is a little bit thin there, too: Anna and Tom are consistently described as a unit. Perfection has two characters that never engage in dialogue and are distinguished from one another very rarely. They seem to experience the same joys, the same fears in leaving Berlin, the same sense of the present disappearing, the same hopes.

    Describing the plot as thin and the central characters as uniform, though, doesn’t really do the book justice. Perfection is conducted in such a stylistically interesting way.  The opening chapter of the book is just descriptions of photographs of an apartment at different angles. It’s a rich, imagistic tableau. The book is also divided into different verb tenses (present, imperfect, remote, future), and the style reflects the phases of AnnaTom / TomAnna’s lives. The book is replete with would bes and wills. The shifting verb tenses reflect the precarity of our lives and offer a commentary on our relationship to time in the present day.

    I suspect the prime appeal of Latronico’s novel is the commentary it offers on modern life, which cuts both ways. Tom and Anna love their remote jobs…sort of. The isolation isn’t ideal, but they are able to connect with other creatives. At the same time, they obsess over social media and post photos from wherever they are with the express purpose of making other people feel bad about not giving up steady work to travel and operate as creatives. The recurring description of their work as creating slightly-off-centered boxes parallels and critiques Tom and Anna’s frustration of everything being the same: they are creating the uniformity that bores them. But it pays the bills. The book also speaks to the collective ennui of experiences and our need for the new, different, and challenging against the more likely satisfying regularity. Tom and Anna’s sex life exemplifies that experience: they are consistently satisfied by one another, sometimes try to add something new into the routine, but ultimately are not adventurous enough to really push beyond what they know. Even when they attend sex clubs together, they do not venture out of their dyad, grateful that they do not have to take any STD tests.

    The end of the book is pretty interesting, too. In the final chapter, Tom and Anna take on managing a hotel. They host a number of clients for a weekend and then are set to restore the rooms to their previous condition. They must retain the image as presented on the website, which is a nice bookend to the first chapter. The reviewer to whom they offered a room publishes the piece with descriptions that they had agreed upon. The question is whether the effort that goes into crafting their lives is truly worth the detriment to the authenticity of their experiences. An open question.

    All things considered, Perfection doesn’t quite live up to its namesake, but the thoughtful project is uniquely memorable. It’s part novella-length character study, part commentary on the gig economy and the lives of remote workers, part existential reflection. It is / would be / will be a good book to take on.

    Happy reading!

Empire's End by Peter F. Crowley

  Before I jump into a review of Empire’s End by Peter F. Crowley, I should explain how it came into my hands. Recently, I took a trip to Boston and when I go on vacation, I try to buy a poetry collection by a local poet as a souvenir, of sorts. I was lucky to discover that Boston has a book store that focuses exclusively on poetry: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop, which is coming up on a century of existence. I loved seeing thousands and thousands of poetry books on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a cramped room (in my estimate, max occupancy is approximately 5). Amid those shelves was one labelled “Local Authors”, so I went about my perusal and the design of Crowley’s book stood out. And so it came home with me.

Crowley’s collection tackles contemporary issues, including the January 6th insurrection, the rise of AI technologies, and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. There’s a clear political impulse here to critique, among other things, capitalist exploitation and toxic work cultures, but it Crowley maintains a poetic impulse that is sometimes lost on more overtly political works. Crowley borders the line of being bombastic, but more often than not veers into the surreal, offering strange connections or unusual imagery to help evoke a response.

As a result, readers are left with two choices for Empire’s End: to root oneself in the images and do the tough work of parsing them, or to let the poems fly by and try to claw your way to a touchstone. I admit that I was mostly in the latter camp, focusing on the big ideas and repeated motifs (Crowley loves eyelids, for instance), with an occasional poem forcing me to linger.

Let’s examine, for a moment, the poem “Dreamless.” It begins with two words on two lines: “plateau-eyed / wasteland.” There’s a kind of deadness to open the scene. Then, in a new stanza, a new start seems to emerge: “shades utter minced light / eyes crawl from bed / the bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh, / asking it to sing. / The flesh has been gorged, / leaving entrails / in the night’s imploding eclipse // And the mirror / is a wasteland” (37). The agency of the scene is largely ascribed to the environment, but the thing being acted upon is often unclear. Shades let the light in, almost conspiratorially. Then “eyes crawl” from the bed and the “bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh”—but whose flesh? The idea of an “imploding eclipse” is also a challenge, an inversion inverted. Ultimately, perhaps it’s the mirror that is being acted upon, taking everything into view. The consequences of the scene are less clear. The scene is evocative, but it doesn’t really demand that I sit with it because I’m not clear on the significance of the scene to a speaker or human entity.

There is another poem that potentially illuminates this one. In “Coming to”, a prose-poem that ends with a stanza that reads as follows:

Sometimes, as he gains self-consciousness and an understanding of surroundings, I have a déjà-vu of traveling the same path, stumbling, tripping and not knowing but, with maple syrup slowness, gaining a sense of things before losing it all again, on days when the sky does not share” (47).

The passage sets up an episteme that seems place-centered. “Self-consciousness,” taken literally as awareness of oneself, emerges alongside an “understanding of surroundings.” Further, there’s a sense of memory attached to place—the speaker is “traveling the same path,” but even when the path is the same, it is fraught with error—”stumbling, tripping and not knowing.” In a sense, Empire’s End offers such landscapes that are at once familiar, though they remain difficult to traverse. The landscape-poems demand “maple syrup slowness” and, once parsed, it appears that the speaker gains “a sense of things before losing it all again,” just like the reader. Each poem is a new challenge that emerges. In reference to the previous poem, though, where there does not appear to be a human cognition of significance, here Crowley refers to “days when the sky does not share,” establishing the primacy of the environment over the speaker. Perhaps that is the key to “Dreamless,” offered as a touchstone in “Coming to.”

I admit that I have some suspicions of what Crowley is up to, but much of his work remains oblique to me, so I rely on such touchstone poems. I’ll refer to a poem late in the collection simply titled “The good poem.” It’s possible that the title is intended ironically, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that Crowley is sincere. The first stanza seems to illustrate Crowley’s writing ambitions and dramatize them in a short eight lines. The first stanza offers the wild juxtapositions, imagery, and political impulses that propel his work: “An angelic blossom consuming the night / A lark performing trapeze acts / A servant killing their master / A fruit devolved into seed” (75). The second stanza takes a different turn: “Knowing that the woodrat’s ripped out throat could’ve been you! / To know birth is an accident and life absurd. / To live with this buried in neural pockets of ghost-formed words. / To transfer to paper the universal thousand-pound cinderblock weight” (75). The final line about transferring a thousand-pound cinderblock weight to paper implies to me a deep pain that needs to be dealt with. The “ghost-formed words” seem to suggest a meaninglessness to language, but the contrast of the pain being placed into words on the page is an effective elevation, however tenuous, of the poetic project. It implies that the violence and unfairness of the previous lines can be dealt with through the poems.

The dark cynicism the pieces comes through elsewhere, sometimes in the form of questions. In the poem “Older corrosion,” the central premise is clear: “When we get older, we corrode” (59). The rest of the poem discusses our decay and the impulse to preserve ourselves. If there were a way to pass ourselves on or extend ourselves without corrosion, it seems tempting. The Utopic sort of ideal quickly takes a dark turn, pointedly offered through two juxtaposed questions: “What of the pigs, whose heads were severed, / though kept alive for hours post-mortem? // But should our dead selves be forever curated / On our daughters and grandsons’ backs?” (60). These questions point towards the darkness in our impulse for longevity, especially with reference to the pigs, presumably subject to the will of human beings. If we are in the same position of captivity and imprisonment, what value is there in prolonging our existence? And, even if we were successful, is it right to force the subsequent generations to curate our lives? Even in the metaphorical sense, is it right for the past to be shouldered by the next generations? It’s a provocative set of questions that seem to imply their own answer, however darkly.

To conclude, let’s examine for a moment the collection’s namesake as a final sample of Crowley’s work. Here is the first stanza of “Empire’s End”:

It is the end of empire.
I walk in circles around
my block like an amnesiac,
avoiding people like the plague.
Our hospitals held in
ransom to tomahawk missiles
and silent-blooded drones,
at last, get a trickle.

We can see the political consciousness that impels the poems on full display here: reference to empire, avoiding people “like the plague” during covid-times, the reference to hospitals and tomahawk missiles (like in Palestine, perhaps?), and so on. The second stanza repeats the idea of empire coming to an end, noting that “Truth died long ago — / if indeed it ever lived” and “today we believe anything: / That an apple ate the sky / That a pear has eyes” (15). In the third stanza, Crowley reference the end of war alongside the end of empire, the sense of privation that comes along with aggression: a return to paradise. Immediately after suggesting a paradise, though, Crowley suggests that it was a “huckster” that “unmasked the entire charade.” In this references to post-truth life and the charade of a paradise we didn’t really have, I can’t help but feel a connection to a certain president with an antediluvian slogan. It results in, in Crowley’s words, an “unmasking.” The end of empire still retains its darkness. Even without empire, there is darkness. In the final stanza, Crowley notes of the unmasking: 

But first there is a steep fall,
like a drunk collapsing
on shards of glass.
No longer is the horror over there.
And when awakening from corona
with power inebriation dissipated:
things are far different


it is the end of empire. (16)

I suppose there is much to discuss in terms of the final lines: “things are far different // it is the end of empire” (16). I can’t help but sense a certain irony here. All of the supposedly generative capacities of empires have faded away, and what is left? More of the same—perhaps as though empire is never about its generative capacity. Despite all of the “awakening from corona” that took place, I can’t help but feel that things both are and aren’t different. As though we’ve reverted to a previous reality, as though whether empire exists or not is immaterial.

Despite the bleak revelations sometimes offered in the poems, I can’t help but think that there’s an optimism at the core of the poetic project. I feel like if we were truly defeated we would not write poems about our concerns. We write only when there is something to be done, that the poems can mean something—can take action. So, with that in mind, I’d encourage you to give Crowley’s poems a chance and then take to the streets to liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of empires.

Stay strong and imagine the possibilities. Happy reading!