Passing a civil service exam or opposing a disheartening future?
The narrator of this novel studies to secure her professional future. She has obtained a temporary position in an administrative office, and taking a civil service exam seems to be the logical next step in her career. However, another kind of opposition, the internal one, based on her observation of daily bureaucratic life, makes her uncertain. The building where she has been assigned, as gigantic as it is impenetrable, is a place of incomprehensible hierarchies that both expels and absorbs her. Since no one explains her duties, she is forced to improvise, hide out of embarrassment, and record her discomfort with drawings and poems as detached from reality as the work itself. The civil servants around her, each with their own quirks and conflicts, have developed the tics and habits typical of work routines and uncritical obedience. In need of meaningful life, genuine pulse, and play, the candidate will make small subversive decisions without anticipating their possible disciplinary consequences.
Through a curious, eager, and increasingly disillusioned gaze, Oposición describes the traps of bureaucratic mechanisms not only for those who endure them but also for those who operate them. The incisive Sara Mesa, who experienced the world of Administration from within, approaches the story of contemporary bureaucracy from the perspective of someone trapped in the dead time of useless tasks, addressing the problem of boredom and apathy in a brilliant, biting, and relentless narrative. Her protagonist, like a hapless and involuntary heroine, faces the worst and most unsettling of absurdities: how we organize ourselves in society.
