Sara Mesa delves into the suffocating reality of bureaucracy

If there is one complaint shared by all citizens, whether left or right, it is how cumbersome bureaucracy can be – also referred to as bureaucracy– and to what extent it envelops us like the sticky filaments of a spider's web. In his latest novel, Opposition, Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1976) rests on this suffocating reality, which affects us all, without exception.

Mesa has always liked to place characters in rarefied spaces and uncomfortable situations, and here he does it again. The protagonist is named after the author, Sara, and is a young woman who joins an administrative office as an interim employee. On her first day, she arrives full of excitement and sits down at the desk assigned to her, a suspiciously empty desk. She thinks it won't be long before she receives her first assignment, but the first assignment takes so long to arrive that she literally doesn't know what to do with the empty hours she has every day ahead of her. From the beginning, it's inevitable to think of the magnum opuses on this subject, the novels about bureaucracy by the brilliant Franz Kafka.

Apparently, like the Czech author, Sara Mesa has also experienced working in the administration, so she knows what she's talking about when she portrays the daily desperation of her protagonist. Is it a blessing or a curse, not having a job?He tried to find out what the function of a position like mine was, he looked for that information on the concierge's website, but he didn't get anything clear. -writes-. In the staff organization chart, hypertrophied in some branches and skeletal in others, there was no place to fit me in.".

For almost the first half of the novel, fictional Sara is bored stiff, and so are the readers. This is not, however, a demerit of the work, but rather an objective achieved that happens to hers. among Remedios Zafra in the essay The Report: Intellectual Work and Bureaucratic Sadness He complained about the overwork that people were forced to do "as long as their bodies held out, to continue paying for a life," in Opposition We witness the absurdity of the bureaucratic system that creates jobs where workers feel useless, uselessness being the Kafkaesque final straw.

Sara's gradual adaptation and her growing relationships with other employees—including a friendship that can be considered as such—make the pages more digestible as the narrative progresses. Week after week, we witness a process that, despite not offering any definitive solution, moderates her unease.The outside world was dusting away, disappearing, while inside everything was becoming more refined, becoming sharper and acquiring a multitude of nuances that I was now able to distinguish like an expert.", we read. What has happened is that Sara has assumed her destiny within the Administration: "I remember that day, when I was scared in front of a glass, I didn't recognize my reflection. I jumped. Was that me? Had that much time passed? It was as if I were fading away or transforming into someone else. Shedding my skin. Metamorphosing. Or maybe, I thought, I was becoming who I truly was.".

William S. Burroughs believed that it was a mistake to reduce The process and The castle to works against bureaucracy and legal injustice. He was absolutely right. Likewise, Opposition It's not just that, but a novel about loneliness, the desire for companionship, and the need to find our place, from which we can reflect on what we do and who we are. Sara Mesa gives this nuanced denunciation, written with her characteristically firm and effective pen, a high mark. Opposition It can also be read as a tribute to Kafka, where in the last pages, as expected, the author verbalizes her debt to the Czech writer: "I was writing my proof document, my absolution, my request for access to the castle, at full speed and with my head bowed.".