The Clerk

Perfectly normal men and women head to their desks every day in a city laid waste by guerrilla incursions, menaced by hordes of starving people, murderous children and cloned dogs, patrolled by armed helicopters, and plagued with acid rain. Among them is an office worker willing to be humiliated in order to keep his job―until he falls in love and allows himself to dream of someone else.

To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream? The Clerk tells a story that happened yesterday, but still hasn’t happened, and yet is happening now. And we didn’t even notice, too tied up in our jobs, our salaries, our appearances. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dostoyevsky.

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 María Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.