Microserfs is one of Coupland's most populair books with a certain cult-status.

The thing which I not really liked, was that that this book contains too much software-terms. A typical "Douglas" with different kind of funny people and their singular qualities.
Typical "Coupland's" were as well the dialogue's and the way the characters go on with each other....When I read it a few years ago, I can remember it was just too sweet for me.

Maybe it was not the right moment to read, right then.

I can remember I liked Generation X and Shampoo Planet a lot more.
But it's not bad, absolutely not! This book is funny, and especially for the one's who are more familiar with software and the computer-business, it's a big surplus. (Then in the early 90's)

This is my favourite of all of Douglas Coupland's books. Sure, technology has evolved tremendously in the 20 years since it was written, but that special feeling of deep geekery remains. Ultimately, I like this book because it's so life-affirming - it's about hard-working geeks taking a risk and discovering love and life and everything in between. Also, I love it because it's the reason I met my wife, which makes it the BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME.

I first read this novel in 1996 just after it was published. Twelve years later and in a new century, it is disturbing to read how much of this is still relatively realistic. It is almost as though the organisational arrangements and lifestyles described have been adopted both as a management and lifestyle model and transplanted, at least in part, around the world.
This book was funny in 1996 when it seemed in part a satirical comment on the new world of geeks and technology. Now it seems more ironic. Many of those for whom this was an accurate depiction of life in the 1990s are still caught in this time warp. The tragedy is that so many others have joined them.
If you have not already read this novel and wondered about the design of a working world in which human interaction through technology has largely replaced direct human interaction: the time is right. After all, in reading this review you are relying on the technology developed by geeks and nerds.

All of the Douglas Coupland books I've read describe a smooth chronologiocal curve of decline from bold, inventive beginnings to trite, heavy-handed melodramatics. This was early enough (1995, 3rd novel) to be pretty tolerable, but it is the last: by 1998 he'd release the completely insufferable Girlfriend in a Coma.

Oh well. I'd say that his post All Families Are Psychotic stuff might be better, except I've heard that in JPod, he wrote himself into the story to deus ex machina straight up and show everyone what's what. A perfect metaphor/example for why I can't stand the guy.

This is a very chill read up until the last quarter, but that last quarter makes this book, without it it's meh. I really enjoyed witnessing the build up from friendship to family between the characters, and that really shines in the finale which is why, I guess, I can't stop talking about it. The characters are solid, and I really like the way Daniel, the narrator (it's his diary) manages to casually capture descriptive details about everything that's going on.
The afternoon I spent with this book was a very pleasant one.

I read this because a friend told me that, from what he knew as an outsider to both, Google today reminds him of Microsoft of the 90's. This book failed to convince me of that -- I mean, all the MS employees leave the company within the first 50 pages -- and also was just generally boring. I made myself finish it, because it wasn't actively making me hate life (hence the 2 stars -- I've known books that *do* (cf. "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"), but it didn't add anything to my life, my understanding of the evolution of Valley tech culture, or just about anything. It reads like a blow-by-blow diary of my freshman year of college -- and, thankfully, I didn't start blogging substantially until *after* that year, which I wouldn't care to read about!

Funnily enough, it took until I was reading it stoned one night to realize that the diary narration is actually just a cute device the author is employing to showcase this culture of geeks and nerds. But I'd failed to see that sober, because it just doesn't work, and makes me hate the narrator for writing a stupid, way-too-detailed diary.

Verdict? Don't waste your time.

La novela trata sobre un grupo de empleados de Microsoft que deciden darle un giro a su vida abriendo su propia compañía de tecnología. Si bien el argumento puede parecer el de un relato aburrido, las descripciones del autor hacen que cada párrafo valga la pena.

A través de los personajes el autor plantea temas importantes para la sociedad, como la adoración a falsos ídolos, el deseo de pertenecer, la superficialidad y la necesidad de sobresalir. Es cómico y desgarrador a la vez, con una idea muy inteligente.

En mi opinión, Microsiervos es el libro de ficción que mejor explica el cambio global de la década de los 90s.

Unhealthy, obsessive, yet unusually brainy coders are the subject of this '90s culture-examining novel. Describing a career at Microsoft as utterly soul deflating, Dan Underwood and his nerdy mates escape to begin developing their own, new, interactive, mutimedia computer program named Oop!. A rollicking adventure of cultural insight and comical genius follows, one with all the emotional understanding of Jane Austen, and the sardonic humour of a more coherent Irvine Welsh. Wacky postmodernism never read so good.

Being I have not read this book since it was published in 1995. And it being a novel heavily based on technology and it's industry of the mid-nineties, the book is dated. Email use is actually explained and the internet is referred to "The Information Superhighway". (Not really the "Self-Promoting Surface Streets" it turned out to be.)

With all that said, I am finding it difficult to actually think about this book as a novel. It seemed more like an immersion in commerce/industry and it's affects on the human consciousness. The characters in the book live in a world without literature, art, music and seemly even a marginal interest in general social skills. Their insights and activities reflect in a soulless existence. As a result they all seem more than a tad ahistorical and sad. The story shows them quietly desperate for some meaning in their lives that their products fail to provide.

Douglas Coupland has the character's performing in an endless dog and pony show to prove their cleverness for the reader, to each other and to keep the story upbeat. And over and over again he likes to tell us what genius's all the character's are, which proves to be annoying after 150 pages of such. (And that being yet another personal pet peeve of mine is when authors tell you what genius's characters are.)

Coupland does in the story make an attempt to show a relationship between the body and the machine but it seems hammy and silly at best.

Nevertheless, being a person who actually lived in the Bay area during this hey day of technology, I enjoyed the story more or less as a reflection of that period and how my outlook of the world has evolved fifteen years later.

Dove sono oggi i Microservi?

Il libro viene pubblicato in America da Harper Collins nel 1995, e tradotto da Feltrinelli l'anno dopo.
Formalmente è il diario di un classico nerd che lavora come programmatore alla Microsoft, e decide di fondare, con alcuni amici, una sua start-up.
Libro sicuramente "generazionale", ne ho apprezzato questi aspetti:

- La veridicità del contesto: la mamma bibliotecaria volenterosa, il papà ingegnegnere licenziato da una ristrutturazione aziendale, "troppo giovane per andare in pensione e troppo vecchio per imparare nuovi trucchi". Nel racconto
emerge più volte il tema dei colloqui per una nuova assunzione a cui papà si sottomette speranzoso.

- Il ritratto generazionale: la passione per i Lego, per certi cartoni animati, per le Barbie, per Star Treck, per i videogiochi, per alcune cibarie non proprio naturali (da noi si direbbe: nutella, sofficini e altre deliziose schifezze)

- Il tratto ironico, e mai moralista, con il quale è raccontata "dal di dentro" la vita in Microsoft: l'importanza del denaro, la competitività calvinista (e quindi non sleale) fra colleghi-ragazzi, la figura mitica di "Bill", sovrano assoluto e imperscrutabile, il cui invito a pranzo, arrivato tramite email, può diventare l'evento che ti cambia la vita

- Il tentativo di sperimentare nuovi modi di scrittura: alcune parti del racconto sono pezzi di codice, altri parole in libertà (in realtà spesso in libera associazione, che ricordano le tag clouds, ma allora non usavano). Altri brani sono stralci di email tagliati-e-incollati

- Un certo senso di malinconia, spesso sincera, (ma volte un po furbetta e autocompiaciuta), e di autentica fragilità che pervade tutto il libro; il minimalismo nei sentimenti (ancora piu' minimo di quello "canonico" di Leavitt, perche' per niente lirico), la sensazione di vivere una vita del tutto innaturale, il desiderio irrealizzabile di avere una "vita propria" esterna al lavoro da programmatori, che e' anche gioco, ma che diventa -proprio per questo- assolutamente pervasivo di ogni momento quotidiano (ben prima del "sempre online" e dell'outing di massa dei social network 2.0)

Citazione
EMAIL DI ABE "Il sistema tech fa crescere qui ragazzi intelligenti e asociali che provengono da famiglie con genitori divorziati e accesi sistenitori della cultura del valore. Noi siamo in una nuova industria: non ci sono persone veramente anziane. Siamo l'avanguardia dell'adolescenza protratta" (pag. 357)

Ma la domanda sorge spontanea: dove sono, adesso, questi post-adolescenti americani descritti da Coupland?
Travolti dalla bolla dotcom?
Tra i nuovi poveri che campeggiano ai bordi di Los Angeles dopo aver perduto la casa?
Negli staff di Obama?

PS
Do un'occhiata alla dedica: il libro è dedicato (tra gli altri) a Louis Rossetto, ed a tutto il gruppo fondatore del vecchio Wired (pre-Anderson), quello degli editoriali di Nicholas Negroponte: quella storia lì (luci e ombre) è raccontata in: Wired : A romance / Gary Wolf. - Random house, 2003, che non ho letto.

Fun little throwback.

Geeky, existentially thought-provoking, heart-warming and simply delightful.