[Review] The Cirlce - Dave Eggers

Author: Dave Eggers

Year: 2013

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pages: 491

Format: Paperback

What if one company would run all your internet activity in one easy, safe and visible place? The Circle is now the most powerful and influential company in the world. Mae Holland know’s she made it, when she lands a job at the glittering Campus of the Circle in California. Her ideals and ambitions become more and more aligned with those of the Circle and we’re getting closer to discover the sinister truth at the heart of an organization seeking to remake the world in its image.

Mea started a new job at The Circle, which is a big data company and more or less an amalgamation of Google, Facebook, Appel, Twitter etc. The Circle’s aim is to make life easier and they collect and unify data from many sources. Mea is excited to work for such an influential company and is soon blinded by there motives. She can’t believe that she got the chance to work for them even as her old life beyond the campus grows distant and a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken and even as her life and her role at the Circle becomes more and more public and millions can view all of her life every minute of the day.

The company releases more and more products, which make it possible to document everything about everyone. They put cameras all over the world on public places and then even on people. Because when we are transparent than there are no secrets and we can share our personal experience with the whole world.

I really liked the book and found it creepy at the same time. The writing was very simple and I hate it when a book has no chapters, that disturbed my flow of reading. But the story was gripping, funny, scary and a scenario likely to be possible, which we all should hope never happens.

At the beginning Mae was great and I really liked her. But then she made some decisions and began to believe everything she’s told, abandons her loved ones and passions and principles. All of the other characters where colorless and for me irrelevant. But that made the book for me so special because I think that the message Dave Eggers tries to send with this book ist the most important part and not the characters or the plot itself. The characters are extreme and unbelievable but the story itself is plausible, fast-pace and entertaining. I thought I was trapped in some kind of nightmare mixed with a comedy.

Dave Eggers created interesting situations with a lot of similarities to the world we live in right now. At first I thought some of it ridiculous but when I started thinking about it then some of these scenarios are not so far off from our experiences today. Sometimes the story was predictable but Dave Eggers also includes some turns in the plot which kept me flipping from page to page.

I can give this Book four out of five hearts. The characters don’t have much depth, the writing is simple and I hated the missing chapters. The end was kind of disturbing and I still have lots of questions. But The Circle was also an exciting, disturbing and interesting story to read. Sometimes predictable but also with some twist in the plot which made it gripping.

Author:

Dave Eggers was born in 1970 and is an American writer, editor and publisher. On of his best-selling books is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the founder of ScholarMatch. That is a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college.