The Circle by Dave Eggers, a Book About Unity

Dave Eggers is my new hero. I enjoy his writing more than a lot of other things, lately, more than any Dan Brown, for sample. I’m going to speak my mind about Inferno, last Brown’s ultra best selling novel, in a future post on this category. Here, I’m gonna praise Mr. Eggers, for his recent The Circle. I have started his 2012 published novel, A Hologram for the King, which determined me to post immediately. Actually I have finished it in the same day, so I have only one word to say about, it: amazing.

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers, was born on March 12, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts, and is beside a very talented writer, an editor, a publisher and a philanthropist. His last novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is considered revolutionary as well, but his most famous published work is a memoir (“a fictionalized non-fiction”, as he described it himself), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book I can’t wait to read as soon as possible. The work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It also won 2000 Time Best Book of the Year, 2000 Washington Post Best Book of the Year, 2000 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, 2000 Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

The Circle is an Orwellian mix, about an hypothetical future IT dictatorship, where to access things online, you need to register first with some future equivalent of Facebook or Google, especially the last one, which is struggling hard to integrate and unify all its services. My gmail contacts are now my circles, Picasa doesn’t make sense anymore because there is Google Plus, the totalitarian integrator of everything representing you online. In the book, there is a company named “The Circle”, built apparently with Google’s organizing system and with Facebook’s tenacity of “connecting” through them with all prices. It is a very near future dystopia, Facebook and Google are mentioned as being “integrated” by “The Circle”, a mega IT corporation which buys or buys out every viable start-up and talent around. It operates through contracts looking very Faustian. Who joined “The Circle” is with it forever, or disappears. It is like Julian Assange’s dream, the transparency is total, and if you don’t do anything vile, you don’t have anything to hide.

It describes a company where the employers are judged after their social media presence, and privacy doesn’t exist anymore. Anyone has to know everything about anyone. The Big Brother is replaced with your “friends”, which are your “followers”. The main character, Mae Holland, a girl coming to work for “The Circle” after a frustrating experience at a provincial small business, where nothing went in the right direction, is enticed by the facilities and becomes a devotee. Total transparency is the road to eliminating crime, respectively terrorism.

Working, or being employed by “The Circle”, is like working today at Google, seems like the ultimate dream. You will see after you read the book. It is very good written and it is very fluent. The action can happen the day after tomorrow.

Like the earlier mentioned Dan Brown, Eggers represent the last generation of major American writers to have emerged entirely from the old values of print.

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