Personal days

I kept thinking, Is the author of Then We Came to the End suing Park? Personal Days, like TWCE, is told in plural first person. Personal Days, like TWCE, takes place in an office. Personal Days, like TWCE, is inhabited by characters who have no grounding in reality, who are deeply neurotic, sometimes psychotic. Personal Days, like TWCE, consists of the slow and mysterious departure of staff and the gradual dissolution of the company. Personal Days, like TWCE, is both funny and sad.

The similarities between the novels bothered me for the first few chapters, then I got enmeshed in the story and forgot about it through most of the read. I liked this book a lot. If I hadn't read TWCE first, I would have said I loved it and I would have raved about the startling originality of the writer. Nevertheless, despite my irritation at the imitation, I liked this book a lot. A lot.

(One more small irritation: Reading the one, long continuous sentence/e-mail that filled the last forty pages grew very, very tedious. Please, Mr. Park. We readers must breathe.)

Here's a quote that is representative of this book: “Most of us are in therapy. Occasionally one of us will quit for a while, laughably convinced we are better, before realizing there's no such thing as better. Haven't we learned that by now? Nothing will ever get better; nothing will ever be fixed. Fixing is not even the point. What is the point?”