Temporary
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3 months free
Temporary
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Narrated by:
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Carly Robins
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By:
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Hilary Leichter
About this listen
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
©2020 Hilary Leichter (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
“Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme…. Her cutting, hilarious critique of the American dream will appeal to fans of Italo Calvino.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A young temp searches for permanence in Leichter’s whimsically surreal fable of late-stage capitalism…. Clever and strange and, in the end, unexpectedly hopeful, less a biting gig-economy satire than a wistful 21st-century myth. A dreamy meditation on how we construct who we are.” —Kirkus
"[Carly] Robins's inflections evoke the perky perfection of a woman who is making incredible connections between the nature of work and life, all amid the story's magical realism. Robins's narration makes this audiobook a delightful experience worthy of multiple listens." —AudioFile Magazine
Temporary is a wonderfully bizarre novel. Readers who prefer to read stories that are grounded in reality or that are ruled by logic and reason may be better off steering clear from the sheer absurdity that is Temporary.
“She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.”
Within this novel Hilary Leichter takes to the extreme the role of a temporary worker and the world which she writes of only vaguely resemble our own. In her hyperbolic vision of a capitalistic society generations of temporaries spend their lives in pursuit of 'the steadiness' (gainful employment/permanency) The temporary positions which one can be assigned to have a Kafkaesque quality to them: opening and closing doors in a house, filling in for a parrot on a pirate ship, assisting a murderer, working as a body scanner that detects emotion, pushing random buttons...each temporary role is dictated by arbitrary rules and nonsensical tasks, or characterised by confounding hierarchies and even sexual harassment.
The narrator, like her mother and her grandmother before her, goes from temporary position to temporary position with an upbeat can-do attitude. To 'work', to do her job, is everything to her, regardless of what the job actually entails. She has several boyfriends, whom she distinguishes by referring to their physical attributes, such as 'the tall boyfriend', or their profession, such as 'the culinary boyfriend, rather than their names.
Throughout the course of the narrative the narrator finds herself doing increasingly outlandish gigs.
The story is ridiculous, and so are the characters and their interactions. But it is also hilariously absurd. Having worked as a temp, and being too aware of the way in which temporary workers are often regarded as little more than disposable cutlery, I deeply enjoyed Leichter's critique of modern society, particularly the gig economy.
The effervescent writing style brought to mind novels by Japanese authors such as Yōko Ogawa, Sayaka Murata, and Hiromi Kawakami while the protagonist's fanciful narration, as well as the peculiar people she encounters, echoed Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Temporary is just endearingly unapologetic in its weirdness.
“We drink some water side by side, our bodies full of fluids, of blood and acid and methods of hydration, caffeination, intoxication.”
Through addition of purply metaphors, frequent rapid-firing of words (so that phrases seem to have been breathlessly blurted out), and ping-pong dialogues, Leichter's magnifies the weird atmosphere of her story.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was just thinking differently.”
“Who said you get to think differently?”
“No one.”
Underneath this novel's layer of surreality lies an all too relevant tale. Clever, funny, nonsensical, Leichter's debut novel is a fable for the modern age.
A surreal fable for the modern age
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