Requiem to Free Time In Contemporary Literature

Modern corporations tend to maximally limit the private time of their employees, arranging collective visits to sports clubs, forays into nature, etc. It is necessary that a person as long as possible stay in the team, the team, so that he does not have time for any critical reflection, The realization that it is simply being used. This is the common place of the western "left" criticism of the modern world, which gives sprouts in the post-Soviet space, "the edition of Abzats writes.

Two young Riga journalists Alexander Garros and Alexei Evdokimov wrote the novel "[head] breaking", for which they were awarded the National Bestseller award, perhaps the most scandalous and controversial Russian literary award.

The protagonist "[head] breaking", a press officer of the Latvian branch of the international bank REX, composes a New Year's greeting to colleagues, where he develops the theme of the Family with special disposition (we are all employees of the bank, one big family). All this - work, colleagues, the need to participate in the "life of the team" - he got it in order, so he also writes his own, unofficial New Year message, where his colleagues and, mainly, the bosses are blown to death. He stores the cherished text in a secret folder in the depths of his working computer, but once his immediate boss reads all this and, as you know, becomes extremely angry. The conflict leads to the fact that our hero simply and mercilessly kills the chief with the first heavy object that fell under his arm. Since then, it ceases to be part of the System. It is a string of bloody murders, described by all the rules of the "black" genre, and becomes in the novel a detailed metaphor of social escapism and creativity.

All would be nothing, but only a dull feeling that all this you once read, does not leave for a minute. And it is true: all the techniques used by the authors in the novel have been worked out in the literature (and not only in the literature, in modern cinema, for example) many times. Computer slang, conditional, functional scenes of violence, reminiscent of the films of Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, the literalization of the title metaphor in the end (the hero, in fact, only doing so that breaks the head to his hated enemies) - a reception characteristic of the work of Vladimir Sorokin . But the main thing, perhaps, is that there is too much journalism in "[head] breaking". A newspaper column stretched to the size of a novel, which, in turn, reminds Federic Begbeder with his "99 francs". Well, critical pathos, of course. Where can I go without it?