Nothing to do at work is almost as bad as having too much. Although for someone who arrives at home, grooves or stressed after an endless working day may seem a privilege, spend the dead hours sitting in your job waiting for it time to leave is exhausting: an authentic psychological torture. If you are also young, with all that this implies with vitality, illusion and desire to “eat the world”, to learn, interact and feel useful, the torment is even greater. As a well -known aphorism says: “Boredom is a subtle poison: it doesn’t kill suddenly, but consumes the soul little by little.”
That is what happens to the protagonist of ‘opposition’ (anagram): it is bored as a presidiary in an isolation cell. The “cell” is a table placed “in the middle of nowhere, in a place of passage, without windows.” The “prison” is a public administration building where the protagonist, a young candidate to official, has achieved an interim post to cover a vacancy. Sara -o Sada, as her classmates believe, because she does not pronounce the “EDE” (the novel is full of ironic and absurd humor) – spend the days waiting for someone to tell him what he has to do. And, when they tell him, he doesn’t have much to do.
Sara Mesa, becoming one of the most celebrated novelists of today thanks to the impact of ‘A Love’ (2020) and the success of the film adaptation made by Isabel Coixet (another is underway, ‘an invisible fire’, one of his first novels), takes a lot of gap to this plot premise. The history of ‘opposition’ takes almost completely in an office; A place where time advances with bureaucratic rhythm, but that the author tells with an almost thriller tempo. Talk about monotony without being monotonous. It manages to transform a gray and routine scenario into an internal battlefield.
Although this occasion does not appear that turbidity and discomfort so characteristic of his novels, as it did in his previous ‘The Family’ (2022) (something that throws a bit of less), the oppressive environments, the psychological wealth of the characters (in this case of the protagonist, since it is written in the first person) and such an agile and precise prose that it is easy to read it from a sitting one without a sitting one without a sitting one without a sitting one is not very recognized.
The title ‘opposition’ can be read in two ways: as a set of evidence to access a public office and as an act of resistance. Sara Mesa plays with that polysemy to offer a story about the public administration from within, seen as a place with its own rules, most of the time absurd and disconnected from reality (the part dedicated to bureaucratic language is sensational: “realizing it was better than doing and receiving better than receiving”), where the protagonist faces a dilemma that can mark the rest of its existence: fight to get a tedious office work and the majority Of the times useless, but sure and comfortable, “for all life”; Or go to a labor market full of precariousness, exploitation and instability, but loaded with possibilities, stimuli and open to creativity and initiative? How much vocation and enthusiasm are in an aspiring official, and how much fear and resignation?
