Hard Copy by Fien Veldman Review

The elevator pitch that got my attention for this novel was “a woman falls in love with a printer” - not a person working the job of printer, but the actual office machine. Alright, that might be fun. And a similar tagline is on the cover too: “This is a story of girl meets printer.” (Hard Copy - geddit, the innuendo, hoho!) And it is that, but it’s also not much more than that - and that’s not enough for a novel.

The only connection that a nameless young woman working in an unchallenging customer services role at some office company has is with a piece of office equipment. Occasionally she searches for a package that hasn’t been delivered to the office but to somewhere nearby. There are flashbacks to her past of a disturbing incident.

Besides the batty romance premise, the obvious observation would be that this is a commentary on the dehumanising nature of corporate life (never heard anything like that before) or the isolation some people feel about modern Western life. But Fien Veldman doesn’t offer up anything compelling in the way of commentary besides this trite opinion.

The sections of the novel that felt like an actual story - the woman searching for the missing package - were mildly intriguing, and why that was happening further underlines Veldman’s point about the unhappiness of corporate life. She similarly hammers home this point of dehumanising work by refusing to give names to any of the characters, just job titles. Got it, great.

Is it even worth mentioning that some people do enjoy corporate jobs as not all are repetitive and bland but quite stimulating and fulfilling, not to mention rewarding which enables people to pursue other life goals like starting a family? Nahhhh - let’s just have a blanket statement that everyone views work in a Capitalist society through this narrow prism of being a cog in a machine.

The sections in italics are apparently flashbacks to the main character’s youth where something bad vaguely happened, although it’s tough to see what relevance it has to the overall story and those sections stop appearing after a while without conclusion, so it feels like wasted effort. Similarly the chapter from the perspective of the printer - it’s quirky (assuming it really is, magically, somehow, the printer speaking and not the main character’s mental state descending to a new low) but also feels pointless.

Hard Copy has a unique premise at the very least and isn’t horribly written. But the lack of anything substantive in the way of story or ideas makes Fien Veldman’s debut novel unimpressive and forgettable. A directionless, unhappy person feels left out because they don’t have much purpose or motivation to improve their lot. Meh. That’s fine as a starting point but it needed much more development than it got here.