Have you ever found yourself pulling an over-nighter shift for your uncaring employer while working alongside your four clones? Probably not. But even without that highly specific life experience, you’ll likely find something to identify with in Defekt by Nino Cipri. This is a book about the sheer crappiness of entry-level work, as well as the sheer crappiness of trying to exist at all in our 21st century hellscape.
But also it’s really friggin’ fun.
The Plot
Derek loves his job at LitenVärld (which definitely isn’t IKEA). Sure, his boss is not exactly kind in her feedback, and his co-workers don’t particularly like him, and some days he wakes up and feels overwhelmed by crushing loneliness, but Derek feels like he was made to sell and assemble furniture.
Things start to unravel for Derek when a concerned co-worker insists that coughing up blood is a reason to take his first-ever sick day. Soon, he finds himself assigned to an overnight inventory shift. Things are, of course, not what they seem, because this is a speculative fiction book.
In short order, Derek is attacked by an animated luxury toilet and rescued by someone who looks strangely like him. Someone who is working on a whole team of people who look strangely like Derek.
Thankfully for both Derek and the reader, we are not actually dealing with 5 identical Dereks, because that would get confusing fast. Each member of the team is distinct. Derek first meets Darkness, a non-binary, artistically inclined person with first aid skills. There’s also cool and competent Delilah, teenage Dex, and alpha-male Dirk. They’re all at Derek’s store to deal with an incursion of “defekta”, dangerous animated household items.
If it seems strange that not-IKEA furnishings would come to life, you need to understand that in Finna, the first LitenVärld book, there was a portal which connected the store to alternate universes, some very similar to ours and some very alien. Weird stuff happens in LitenVärld.
As Derek tries to find his place in this team, he sees each of his teammates as some potential other version of himself, either amplifying traits he has, or exemplifying traits he wishes he had.
Why Defekt Worked For Me
Despite being about a corporate dystopia only slightly removed from our own reality, Defekt is a strangely hopeful book. It’s a story about the lengths corporations will go to in order to make a dollar (and/or reduce their carbon footprint). But it’s also a story about deciding who you want to be, what you want in life, and what you’re willing to put up with. It’s about finding a solution better than the obvious one. About questioning what you’ve been told. About finding people who accept you, and could even love you, even though you feel weird.
Defekt is punk. But it’s the sort of punk that operates an anarchist soup kitchen or publishes a zine full of utopian fiction or creates street art out of found objects.
Is It a Stand-Alone?
Defekt is the sequel to Finna. It takes place concurrently/shortly after the events of Finna, and features an overlapping cast of characters. I don’t think you need to have read Finna to understand Defekt, but if you read Defekt first, it will spoil some of the events of Finna. And after reading Defekt, you’re going to want to read Finna in order to spend more time in LitenVärld, so you might as well read them in order. They’re both quite short, so it won’t take you long (maybe someday in the future we’ll get an omnibus edition featuring both books together? That would be swell).
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