Subsidiary, The - Hardcover

Matias Celedone

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 161219544X ISBN 13: 9781612195445

Publisher: Melville House Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

A WHOLLY ORIGINAL NOVEL BY ONE OF CHILE'S RISING LITERARY STARS

A 'corporate Heart of Darkness', The Subsidiary is both an exquisitely designed art object and a chilling tale of corporate evil.

All hell breaks loose when a power outage shuts down a major Latin American corporation; using the stamps he has for marking official documents, one employee bears witness.

The Subsidiary could be called 'a corporate Heart Of Darkness'; just as Conrad's novella was an indictment of the barbarism of imperialism, Celedon's is a violent dramatisation of the dark side of corporate life - that also nods suggestively (for a writer who grew up in the shadow of Pinochet) at the government forces that might be behind it.

The book is also beautifully designed artisanal object that will appeal to readers who loved Karen Green's Bough Down (Siglio Press, 2013) or Robert Walser's Microscripts (New Directions, 2012). Each of the book's pages is an illustration of the text. It comes with a unique origin story: Celedón stumbled across an antique stamp set when he was in a bookstore in Santiago, before the story of The Subsidiary even came to him. When it did, he individually typeset the brief text of each page into a stamp and then stamped them himself into the pages of the book.

About this title

Review:

"Powerful, beautiful, and haunting. Every time I read The Subsidiary, it feels both timeless and painfully, undeniably contemporary." --Alejandro Zambra

"More of a fine art project than a piece of writing in any familiar sense... the conventions of genre elide into something more mythic." --The Times Literary Supplement

"The telegraphic language intensifies the horror...A gem of alienation distilled into silent screams in the dark." --BBC Culture

About the Author:

Matias Celedon was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1981. He is a screenwriter, journalist, and the author of three novels. This is his first translation into English.

About this edition

• Publisher: Melville House Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 161219544X
• ISBN 13: 9781612195445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208