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| Then We Came to the End: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Joshua Ferris
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
New (43) from £0.76
Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 1413
Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0141027630
EAN: 9780141027630
ASIN: 0141027630
Publication Date: January 4, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: We ship daily from the United Kingdom
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 A Marvelous Read, but for a VERY Specific Audience August 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I can understand the mixed reviews of this book, though I loved every page of it and wished it would never end. To appreciate it, you not only need to have worked in an office, you need to have worked in this KIND of office.
I happened to work in two offices where everyone had their noses in everyone else's business, where people had conniptions over nonsense such as where their "legitimate" chair is located, and whether or not the axe will fall anytime soon. That it is set in the Spring and Summer just prior to 9/11 is no accident; the economy was already starting to tank and 9/11 only made things worse for those teetering on the brink. In this office, people are being fired right and left, but the remaining folks are more worried about the health situation of their boss and the private lives of their co-workers. Who has a crush on whom? Who is a complete whackjob? This is office life, folks, at least in my old office.
This book is so full of quotable lines and great twists that there isn't much I can say without giving it away. People who have worked in my situation will likely love it. People who haven't, or who don't enjoy programs such as The Office because they hit too close to home, will not like it at all.
Joshua Ferris is an excellent writer and this is a stunning debut. I'm very much looking forward to what comes next.
 Gave up - not funny or interesting August 17, 2008
Like the person before - I seldom give up on a book, but this just felt like a waste of my life. Couldn't fnd the humour or any real plot. Maybe it came good in the end - but I doubt it
Then we came to the end - and we were very glad that we did August 16, 2008
Life is short, far too short to spend chained to an office desk. This seems to be one of the messages in Joshua Ferris's debut. Well, life certainly is too short to spend reading books like this.
If you believe the reviews, blurb and cover quotes, this poor attempt at a darkly satirical study of office politics and minutiae is a riotous romp that lays office life bare in hilarious fashion. The truth is that this book reads like it was written by someone who has read some other books about working in an office, or possibly seen a film or two. The writing does not suggest that the author himself in fact has experienced real office life for any length of time. The result in this case is an abject lack of true insight and a shallow narrative that barely scratches the surface of the 9 to 5 (or longer) corporate culture and which is embarrassingly unfunny. Quite simply, Ferris does not understand the world he is trying to portray (which becomes very obvious very early on) and consequently, he has nothing of value to tell us about it.
The book has no real plot or character development, albeit that recurring themes are present. The patchwork of vignettes about office goings-on that are presented here are not witty, perceptive, true-to-life, or entertaining. The chapter in which we get an insight into the life of a particular office worker, planted randomly into the middle of some tedious nonsense Ferris has set down about dismantling a chair or storing a totem pole (hilarious this stuff is not) is the book's strongest and most effective section, but even these passages are not wholly convincing and feel artificially inserted in an attempt to lend this novel a gravitas and meaning that are missing from the rest of the book.
Ferris clearly has talent, though it is woefully misdirected here, and this book might have earned two stars from me, were it not for the underlying sense of smugness with which it has been written, as if it is truly enlightening all us mere minions as to office life and the pointlessness thereof. "Then We Came To The End" is a misfire that has been wildly overhyped. It is shallow at its core, and indeed, on every ill-informed page, and I am sorry I spent any of my precious life on this planet outside of the office reading it. My feeling upon coming to the end was annoyance at the time I had wasted on it.
When will I come to the end?! August 12, 2008
I love books but I really hated this one.
We read this book for our private Book Club and therefore I felt I had to finish it. It was such hard work, every page dragged. I didn't enjoy the characters, actually I thought most of them were horrible. There wasn't any humour, the story was super dull, nothing happens. It was such a shame as I thought Richard and Judy books were a good read?
Well we all had fun slating it thats for sure.
 It struggles to get to the end August 2, 2008
Rarely can the choice of voice for a novel have had such mixed results. And rarely has the choice of title seemed so ironic. Ferris opts to write in the first person plural - we - and the effect is very distinctive. Yet from pretty early on the reader cant help but ask: how ever will this come to an end?
For the first couple of hundred pages the choice of voice seems brilliant. The book is a portrait of the mundane mediocrity of modern corporate life: a world where the work is good enough and well paid enough to fear being sacked; and yet not sufficiently compelling to prevent puerile office politics from pervading every moment of the day. 'All today's intrigue was just cheap talk to better dramatize our lives,' says Ferris's collective narrator.
By adopting 'we' as the narrating voice Ferris brilliantly captures the collective ennui, and the sense of an office workforce as a moderately effective sum of dysfunctional individual parts. And this works fine for so long as there is no real plot. But when your voice is plural, and your book has to conjure an ending, what do you do? Whose story in the end will this be?
The answer Ferris probably should have chosen would have been to quit early: allow your book to be a wry and dry mood piece - a timeslice of corporate blandness - and call it a day on the sunny side of page 250. But instead Ferris tries to turn two of the slight plot lines into something bigger. For the first he actually leaves the office environment, goes home with a character, and abandons the first person plural for the third person singular for a while. It feels very odd - as if he has lost faith in his endeavour. He eventually brings the book back to the collective, and then pursues a more bold second plot line. But that too requires him to abandon his central device - and in any case it fails to deliver on the drama the reader thinks is coming.
At that point, with well over 50 pages still to go, you really want to leave this group of hopeless people. But Ferris plods on. He attempts a twist on the 'we' in the very last sentence, but this reader has long since lost interest, and the device just feels faintly irritating.
There is much to admire early on in the acute observation ('He was in Account Management, and, strange for any account person, he had hung something non-Monet on the wall.'), and it is satisfying to have the e-mail driven, faux-creative world of the modern media economy so exquisitely filleted.
But ultimately this feels like a flawed experiment in creative writing - and all the clever sounding people Ferris thanks at the end should have helped him out better.
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