{"id":303106,"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\/latest-review-the-room-by-jonas-karlsson\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:33","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:33","slug":"latest-review-the-room-by-jonas-karlsson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/12\/16\/latest-review-the-room-by-jonas-karlsson\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "The Room" by Jonas Karlsson"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews<\/a> section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Room<\/em> by Jonas Karlsson, translated by Neil Smith and out from Hogarth.<\/p>\n

Peter Biello is the host of All Things Considered at New Hampshire Public Radio. He has served as a producer\/announcer\/host of Weekend Edition Saturday at Vermont Public Radio and as a reporter\/host of Morning Edition at WHQR<\/span> in Wilmington, North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Here’s the beginning of Peter’s review:<\/p>\n

\n

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<\/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<\/blockquote>\n

\n

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<\/blockquote>\n

\n

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<\/blockquote>\n

For the rest of the review, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Room by Jonas Karlsson, translated by Neil Smith and out from Hogarth. Peter Biello is the host of All Things Considered at New Hampshire Public Radio. He has served as a producer\/announcer\/host of Weekend Edition Saturday at Vermont Public Radio […]<\/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":[67456],"tags":[63296,63276,63286,54456,1646,6436,63306],"class_list":["post-303106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-hogarth","tag-jonas-karlsson","tag-neil-smith","tag-peter-biello","tag-review","tag-swedish-literature","tag-the-room"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303106","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=303106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309146,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303106\/revisions\/309146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}