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Available
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Collection
Series
Description
"The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge"--… (more)
Original publication date
2013-10-08
Media reviews
Van alle romans die ik dit jaar las, is De Cirkel van Dave Eggers het meest blijven na-ijlen. Niet omdat het literair het beste boek is, maar vanwege de verontrustende beelden die het oproept, beelden die na de laatste bladzijde niet langzaam wegebben, maar hinderlijk blijven doorspoken. De Cirkel
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is het 1984 van het internettijdperk genoemd, maar beschrijft een werkelijkheid die veel nabijer lijkt en daardoor dreigender voelt dan Orwells tijdloze boek. Show Less
Even as satire, The Circle is disappointing as a novel: the plot is too easy, the prose simple, the characters flat and undistinguishable. Due to these same qualities, however, The Circle succeeds as commentary on the era of big data and transparency. The scary part is that the Silicon Valley of
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The Circle barely seems like a caricature. The easiest comparison of the Circle is to Google — whose Mountain View campus keeps its employees fed, fit, massaged, and, well, kept. The Circle’s mottos and mantras are the same buzzwords already posted on billboards and batted around in cafes and bars. Show Less
Some will call The Circle a “dystopia,” but there’s no sadistic slave-whipping tyranny on view in this imaginary America: indeed, much energy is expended on world betterment by its earnest denizens. Plagues are not raging, nor is the planet blowing up or even warming noticeably. Instead we
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are in the green and pleasant land of a satirical utopia for our times, where recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each another, and the brave new world of virtual sharing and caring breeds monsters. Show Less
Het onrecht dat in The Circle bestreden wordt, is de expansiedrift van Silicon Valley, zoveel is vanaf de eerste pagina duidelijk. En Eggers gebruikt daarvoor de meest absurde metaforen: drones uitgerust met camera’s die mensen zonder Circle-account achtervolgen en ‘ik wil gewoon vrienden
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worden’ scanderen, of een transparante haai die een heel aquarium leegeet. Het punt is gemaakt, Dave Eggers.
Toch verdient Eggers een like. Zijn versie van de wereld is bewust extreem: hoe het wordt als we allemaal zulke schapen worden als Mae Holland, die kritiekloos Silicon Valley achternalopen. Hij verzint een wereld die – veel maar net niet helemaal – op de onze lijkt, waarin mensen hun vrijheid inleveren, betoverd door quasifilosofische toespraken, moderne bedrijfsvoering en onbeperkt aandacht van een miljoenenpubliek. Eggers vraagt zich niet af welke wereld er is, maar welke kan komen. En zoals in The Circle heeft hij het duidelijk liever niet. Show Less
This potential dystopia should sound familiar. Books and tweets and blogs are already debating the issues Eggers raises: the tyranny of transparency, personhood defined as perpetual presence in social networks, our strange drive to display ourselves, the voracious information appetites of Google
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and Facebook, our lives under the constant surveillance of our own government.
“The Circle” adds little of substance to the debate. Eggers reframes the discussion as a fable, a tale meant to be instructive. His instructors include a Gang of 40, a Transparent Man, a shadowy figure who may be a hero or a villain, a Wise Man with a secret chamber and a smiling legion of true-believing company employees. The novel has the flavor of a comic book: light, entertaining, undemanding. Show Less
The Circle is een didactisch boek en in literair opzicht heeft dat consequenties. Gedreven door zijn omineuze boodschap besteedt Eggers weinig aandacht aan karakterisering, waardoor waarlijk interessante personages ontbreken en ook hoofdpersoon Mae een flat character blijft. Maar aan de hand van de
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beschreven gebeurtenissen schetst hij wel een intrigerend en in veel opzichten geloofwaardig beeld van een nabije toekomst.
De apotheose van de roman is spannend en beklemmend, niet in de laatste plaats omdat letterlijk alle dreigende elementen, veel concreter dan bij Brave New World en 1984, reeds in onze directe omgeving aanwezig zijn.
Misschien wordt de term 'een verontrustend boek' soms wat lichtvaardig gebruikt. In het geval van The Circle lijkt het haast een understatement.
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"In his desire to create a world where The Circle rules all, Eggers creates so many extremely unlikely or outright impossible scenarios that happen simply because he needs them to happen. As they stack up through the course of the book, it gets harder and harder to take it seriously even as satire
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until finally it becomes outright fantasy, with only a tenuous connection to reality as we know it." Show Less
What makes The Circle interesting is that the critiques it piles on the digital era have so much obvious merit. ... But a great novel requires more nuance and complexity than Eggers delivers in The Circle. ... The Circle doesn’t read like a novel whose author immersed himself in the nitty-gritty
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of day-to-day life in Silicon Valley. It reads like a novel whose author deeply dislikes current modes of online social interaction, and constructed a narrative to deliver that antipathy as harshly as possible. Show Less
Because it is a fast-moving conspiracy potboiler, The Circle is far more entertaining than, and not nearly as maddening as, say, Jonathan Franzen’s apocalyptic rants about “the infernal machine of technoconsumerism,” even though Eggers seems just as appalled by the liking-and-sharing economy.
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From its opening lines—“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven”—The Circle sends out a familiar distress signal about a cultlike movement, a Silicon Valley revival meeting, a utopia breeding a totalitarian nightmare. Mae, the protagonist, takes an entry-level position in “Customer Experience” at the sprawling, city-on-a-hill campus of the Circle, which is busy leveraging its stranglehold on the search and ad-serving markets and its deep reach into the psyches and pockets of the global populace to manufacture a total-surveillance society. Cameras for everyone, everywhere! Not 70 pages in, Mae attends an all-hands meeting starring Eamon, one of the Circle’s “wise men,” who delivers the Circle’s Nineteen Eighty-Four–style mission statement: “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.” Show Less
Will Mae wake up to the dangers of the company in time — before “the Circle closes,” and everyone, everywhere “will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape”? Or will her success there and her celebrity around the world keep her on the reservation? Will her romance with
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a mysterious and possibly sinister man who calls himself Kalden change her view of the company? Will her parents’ detestation of the Circle’s surveillance policies and her growing estrangement from them affect the big decisions she needs to make?
Such questions drive this lumpy novel toward its not terribly unexpected conclusion. It’s not Mr. Eggers’s best work, but it draws upon enough of his prodigious talents to make for a fun and inventive read. Show Less
It’s safe to say that The Circle is neither as eye-opening, nor as criminal as they would have you believe. Eggers does manage to serve up some piercing satire, particularly when he zeroes in on privacy-eroding features couched as a benevolent acts of information-sharing, or cloistered campuses
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and bountiful perks designed to destroy any distinction between work and life. But mostly the plot is pulpy and digestible, with evil executives so power-hungry, corporate self-interest so malevolent, and menacing products so improbable that it’s hard to see any kind of reform—or even instructive discussion—rising from his hazy warning signals. Without much editing, Eggers could turn all 491 pages into an blockbuster screenplay and I’d happily plunk down $14 to be entertained on opening night. Ultimately The Circle is just an edge-of-your-seats sci-fi thriller that only intermittently offers a telling critique of Silicon Valley culture—less The Jungle 2.0 than a pivoted relaunch of The Firm. Show Less
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2015)
John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (Finalist — 2014)
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction (Longlist — Fiction — 2014)
Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2013)