On her first day at work, Sara Villalba is given a desk in a windowless passage. The computer looks like a way to begin. Its icons lead nowhere useful, or ask for passwords she has not been given. She waits. Nothing very dramatic has happened, but the situation has already become difficult: should a new employee ask more questions, or demonstrate that she can follow instructions?
The discomfort is immediately recognizable in Anagrama’s Spanish opening excerpt. Waiting can look like obedience or a lack of initiative. Asking can look like eagerness or a nuisance. Sara does not yet know which interpretation will attach to her, and the people who could tell her are busy with something else.
Sara Mesa’s 2025 novel begins with employment that has apparently solved a problem. Sara has joined a public institution in a temporary capacity; she has not passed the competitive examination that would secure a permanent position. From the outside, this could be the start of a sensible future. From her new desk, she cannot even establish what she is supposed to do today.
The day has been taken, but not put to use
This is a different starting point from the familiar story of overwork. Sara is not buried under demands until she finally refuses. Initially, she would welcome a task. Being told what needs doing would give her something to understand, a reason to approach somebody, perhaps a small success with which to get through the morning.
Instead, the institution has made room for her without making her function clear. Her time is accounted for before she knows what it is being used for. The embarrassment of having nothing to do is left to her, although she has not chosen the arrangement.
In Letras Libres, Elisa Martínez Salazar makes a useful comparison with Melville’s Bartleby, turned in reverse: this employee would prefer to do something useful, but is not given the opportunity. The comparison matters even without the literary reference. It moves the question away from whether a worker is doing too much or too little. What does it feel like to have almost no say in what either quantity means?
Wanting a meaningful day need not make productivity the measure of a person’s worth. Sara’s unease does not deserve attention because she is secretly a better employee than everybody else. She is the person who has to live through these hours. The fact that they are paid for cannot settle everything about them.
The opening also lets an expectation from outside the office enter the room. Sara calls her mother and says things are going well. Her mother is delighted and wants details about the new job; Sara does not convey her isolation and uncertainty. It is a small, ordinary failure of communication, sharpened by affection. Once somebody has become happy for you, it can be surprisingly hard to explain that you have not yet found a way to be happy yourself.
The people who make a place bearable
An office is never only its rules. As the book’s workplace takes shape, Sara encounters Teresa, a legal adviser and one of her superiors; the more experienced Beni, who encourages her to sit the examination; and Sabina, who works in information technology and becomes close to her. Each makes a different claim on her attention.
Beni’s advice is perfectly comprehensible as career advice. A secure position offers advantages a temporary appointment cannot. Yet an argument can be reasonable without answering the whole question facing the person who must act on it. To say that a path is prudent is not to say what a life spent following it will feel like.
Sabina introduces another complication. A place that was uninviting can become somewhere you look forward to going because a particular person may be there. The building has not improved. The tasks may be no clearer. But your attention now has a destination. Workplaces acquire much of their emotional force through attachments that an organizational chart cannot describe.
Writing in Argentina’s La Nación, Felipe Fernández praises the small expressive variations in Sara’s narration as she tries to adapt and get along with colleagues. This offers a useful indication of the novel’s movement beyond its opening. Repetition need not mean that the person passing through it remains unchanged.
The same room after several months is not the room of the first week. A remark now has a history; somebody’s advice carries the weight of earlier conversations; a familiar presence can become necessary. Such changes also make leaving, staying, or seeking a permanent place less simple than a verdict on whether the institution is absurd. Sara has to make a future among people, not among propositions.
Learning the language, hearing what is wrong with it
One way into this closed world is to listen. Administrative language can lend an air of necessity to an arrangement long before anybody has explained its purpose. A new employee learns the words because she needs to function, but learning to repeat them is different from finding them convincing.
In Bruno Padilla del Valle’s interview for Revista Mercurio, Mesa discusses the friction between rigid, euphemistic administrative language and more direct forms of expression. Wordplay, colloquial speech and deliberately wayward formulations are part of that friction. The interest is not simply in laughing at long sentences. A manner of speaking can decide whether a difficulty remains available for discussion or has already been filed away as normal procedure.
For an English-language reader considering the Spanish original, this is worth knowing before approaching the novel as a universal office fable. The particulars of the voice matter. Much of the pleasure lies in what a phrase sounds like, the authority it tries to borrow, and the small disturbance made by saying something another way.
Sara’s drawing and poetry belong in this context. They do not have to become an organized campaign to register a refusal. Before a person has an account of what ought to change, she may feel an urge to describe things in words that do not belong to the office.
Mesa also distinguishes her own voice from her narrator’s in the interview. This Sara can be direct, naïve and somewhat rough. Sharing a first name does not collapse author and character into one person. More importantly, the first person brings us close to an observer without making every observation fair. Sara’s impatience, enthusiasm and attempts to understand other people remain hers to get wrong.
That gives the humor more room than a procession of foolish bureaucrats would allow. We can recognize something ridiculous and still wonder about the person pointing it out. She is inside this world, trying to live there. Her account is one of the things the office produces.
Can boredom sustain a novel?
A book largely confined to an administrative building takes a real formal risk. It cannot rely indefinitely on the reader’s agreement that meaningless procedures are frustrating. The language, encounters and changes of emphasis must make continued attention worthwhile.
Martínez Salazar describes a shift from the opening’s unease toward more overt humor as Sara grows familiar with her surroundings. Dánel Negro’s more skeptical response in Galiciaé is worth placing alongside that account. Negro finds the plot gray and some supporting characters, including Teresa and Sabina, insufficiently compelling, while identifying the language as the strongest relief from the monotony. These are reservations about how the fiction works, not merely objections to its subject.
The difference helps set expectations. A reader looking for a decisive campaign against official corruption may find the novel’s smaller movements evasive. Someone interested in voices, awkward exchanges and the gradual alteration of a working day has another reason to turn the page. Recognition alone is not the reward; the question is what Mesa can make happen within something recognizable.
The Spanish title keeps two possibilities in view: the competitive public-service examination, and opposition or resistance. One offers a way further into the institution. The other names a difficulty with accepting its terms. Neither can simply erase Sara’s need for an income, her attachments to colleagues or her wish to have a future.
She has a chair, a computer and a place she is expected to occupy. What remains unsettled is how much of a life those arrangements should be allowed to determine. The opening makes that uncertainty tangible before anyone has had time to call it a principle.