Book Club: Seasonal Associate

Seasonal Associate is a novel about one woman’s experience as a temporary worker in an Amazon warehouse. From doomed workplace romances to cycles of physical and existential fatigue, the novel explores the everyday burdens of labor, resistance, and solidarity within a failing economic system. 

The novel’s protagonist, a struggling German writer, accepts the warehouse job as a last resort that she halfheartedly justifies as an intellectual project. The outline of the story mirrors author Heike Geissler’s own experience as a temporary Amazon worker. However, throughout the novel, Geissler refers to the main character primarily in the second person, simply as “you;” “From now on, you are me,” she declares in the first chapter. Through Geissler’s second person narration, Seasonal Associate forgoes the form of a memoir for a more ambitious and complex project: a story that captures the simultaneously personal and universal experience of working under capitalism.

This clever narrative approach transforms one individual’s experience into a statement on the necessity of solidarity and class consciousness. At the beginning of the story, Geissler writes: “You’ll get the job and you’ll be pleased to have gotten it, and then you’ll be tired, you’ll hardly keep your eyes open every day . . . and you’ll know a great deal more about your life and the lives of your parents and all those who have bosses.” In this way, Seasonal Associate proceeds on multiple narrative levels, alternating between the specific and universal so many times that any distinction begins to feel arbitrary, possibly nonexistent. 

As an avid reader of novels, I found Seasonal Associate’s genre-bending style to be incredibly refreshing; Geissler’s storytelling adds detail and texture to familiar sociopolitical dynamics, raising new questions about how our way of working shapes our relationships with one another. If you are interested in thinking more deeply about work–whether your own work or the work of others–I highly recommend this book.

— Book Club Member Allie