{"id":303096,"date":"2015-12-16T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/12\/16\/the-room\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:28","slug":"the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/12\/16\/the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"The Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019ve ever worked in a corporate office, you\u2019ve likely heard the phrase, \u201cPerception is reality.\u201d To Bj\u00f6rn, the office worker who narrates Jonas Karlsson\u2019s novel <em>The Room<\/em>, the reality is simple: there\u2019s a door near the bathroom that leads to a tidy little room with a desk. Inside this room, he feels a profound sense of peace. The problem is that Bj\u00f6rn is the only one in the office who can see the room.<\/p>\n<p>Bj\u00f6rn is a new employee at \u201cthe Authority\u201d at the start of the novel. He describes himself as ambitious and smart, but within a matter of pages, it becomes clear that he\u2019s unreliable. He reprimands a co-worker for allowing the files on his desk to spill onto Bj\u00f6rn\u2019s, an obvious overreaction. We begin to realize that the whole office is concerned about Bj\u00f6rn\u2019s strange behavior when the manager, Karl, sends an email to the entire staff that says: \u201cWe will be putting staffing issues under a microscope.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>What follows Karl\u2019s email is the revelation that Bj\u00f6rn sees a room nobody else can, and that, while Bj\u00f6rn thinks he is inside the room, he is actually staring at the wall. Karl and the staff confront him about this behavior, but Bj\u00f6rn, so convinced of his own reality, insists that everyone else is delusional or conspiring against him. <\/p>\n<p>Karl asks Bj\u00f6rn to get professional mental-health counseling. Bj\u00f6rn does, but it doesn\u2019t help. Then Bj\u00f6rn discovers that being in the room allows him to do advanced-level work, he uses the subsequent boost in productivity as leverage. The tables turn; Bj\u00f6rn is now able to force the rest of the office to accept that a room that does not exist, does. The door becomes a metaphor for the ridiculous lows to which office culture can stoop.<\/p>\n<p>As a narrator, Bj\u00f6rn comes across as an arrogant know-it-all, but what prevents him from becoming insufferable is his isolation. When he\u2019s at home alone, he paints a sad picture: \u201cI put on a CD of Mozart\u2019s Piano Concerto No. 21, but soon swapped it for one of Sting\u2019s albums, only to switch to Dire Straits and then John Cougar Mellencamp. I didn\u2019t really feel like listening to any of them, but liked the idea of associating with the very best.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Who is he trying to impress? Here Bj\u00f6rn is trying to convince himself he\u2019s closer to his idea of an admirable person, but he knows he\u2019s falling short. He hurts, but the pain is buried. So when he says, \u201cInhibited people don\u2019t see the world the way it really is. They only see what they themselves want to see,\u201d we realize better than he does that he\u2019s speaking about himself. <\/p>\n<p><em>The Room<\/em> is more than the story of an office nutcase. It\u2019s a hilarious portrait of corporate culture, which allows strong personalities to force rational people to accept (or at least tolerate) irrational ideas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019ve ever worked in a corporate office, you\u2019ve likely heard the phrase, \u201cPerception is reality.\u201d To Bj\u00f6rn, the office worker who narrates Jonas Karlsson\u2019s novel The Room, the reality is simple: there\u2019s a door near the bathroom that leads to a tidy little room with a desk. Inside this room, he feels a profound [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[63296,63276,63286,54456,6436,63306],"class_list":["post-303096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-hogarth","tag-jonas-karlsson","tag-neil-smith","tag-peter-biello","tag-swedish-literature","tag-the-room"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333516,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303096\/revisions\/333516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}