A PLACE UNDER THE SUN

Urtueta’s debut literary novel chronicles a week in the life of a white-collar worker.

Henry is a business consultant who hails from Madrid, Spain. He spends much of his working time on the 11th floor of a “tower by the sea” completing tasks for a company called Anthony Freckleman (or “AF,” as it is sometimes referred to). Henry travels to Dubai frequently, about 40 times a year, at the behest of AF. He usually wakes up for his trips feeling energetic, which means he enjoys “forty wake-ups a year on which [he feels] hopeful and energetic: not a bad number.” He works with an international, cosmopolitan team with colleagues and friends from places all over the world, including Slovakia and Lebanon. (Henry went to prep school in Massachusetts.) The novel follows Henry as he engages in business activities like attending meetings and listening to the gripes of co-workers. He knows how to do things like rate clients in order to get them to something called the “maximum capability level.” But Henry also knows philosophy—he will subtly compare a situation to something out of Socrates and cite an acquaintance who works in fashion as an example of “Nietzsche’s superwoman.” Or, he may paraphrase Valery when he explains that “A presentation, no matter how long one worked on it, was never really finished until it was presented, until it died by the projector.” As the reader learns, there is a lot going on under the surface in this seemingly dull yet sophisticated and competitive world of international business consulting.

Henry’s life is not one of slapdash excitement. Though he gets to travel extensively, this is because he must fulfill obligations like attending anti-discrimination training in Germany. There is not much that threatens him on a day-to-day basis outside of his own thoughts. This is a reality he reflects on when he considers how, as he finds himself in a room “refrigerated by a central air-conditioning system, and surrounded by concrete, by one floor below and two above,” people like his grandfather fought in the Spanish Civil War. And not just fought, but “slept rough, marched, starved, and shivered through it. Nature was right at the doorstep of these people’s bodies.” Henry has many such thoughtful observations to share, right down to how, in his school days, he became addicted to playing “Twisted Metal, a weird game to be fond of.” At one point, he sees a woman in a suit who “seemed to be the lady from Murder She Wrote.” It is an image that, for those who know the television program, is incredibly astute. Unfortunately, getting to such moments often requires wading through less than scintillating material. For instance, when Henry stays at one hotel, the staff forget to give him a spoon with his lentil soup; in due time, he gets a spoon. The scene is no more thrilling than it sounds. An early sequence portrays Henry interviewing a woman for a position at AF. The interview has to be stopped so that Henry can participate in a presentation—this is not a particularly high-stakes situation. While events do pick up in later pages, the real intrigue of the novel comes in the finely rendered details.

A careful and critical, if sometimes banal, portrait of an international businessman.