[Review] The Circle - Dave Eggers

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Price: € 14,95
Page count: 491
Language: English

Contents

Mae is thrilled when she has her first day of work at 'The Circle', the only corporation that really matters. 'The Circle' is a social network that unites all of people's identities on the internet. But the enterprise strives to become much more important in the lives of everyone on earth. Actually they want to know everything about everyone because only the truth can make the world a better place, right?

My opinion

A few years ago I read '1984' by George Orwell and I always wondered how people could have let it come so far as complete surveillance. And now that I have read 'The Circle' it all makes more sense to me and sadly I can really imagine this scenario happening in our future.

I found reading this book very interesting because of the actions that the different characters take and I tried to imagine what the persons would do based on what I knew about them until that point. Especially at the end I was extremely satisfied that I was right although I was quite shocked that it turned out the way it did.

At the beginning I felt comfortable with the protagonist Mae but as the story went on I found myself judging her for her actions and I like to think that I would have acted differently. And that was also intriguing about this book: reflecting what you yourself would have done in such a situation. That's really positive when a book can do that.

Sometimes I felt that the plot slowed down a bit too much and with some scenes I wondered why they were in the book when I read them, because I didn't think that they added anything to the story. Mostly those scenes were rather slow. But further on they definitely made sense again and afterwards I wouldn't have taken out any of these scenes, maybe they did drag a little too much but I could live with that. They weren't absolutely boring either.

One aspect I didn't like was that the setting almost entirely focused on the United States although I think that it would have made it far more realisitc if the development had been observed globally. That all the other countries are not only mentioned once or twice. The only problems that The Circle had in any countries were because of tax reasons. Really? Is there not one country that tries to stop The Circle? No country that is successful with the claim that it is a monopoly and needs to be restricted?

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