Yellow Book
by Zeshan Shakar
Mani is a recent economics graduate and has just got a job at the Ministry of Childhood and Adolescence. He’s a young man who lives with his father in an apartment in Haugenstua, a 1960s tower-block development in north-eastern Oslo, and he has a girlfriend he thinks he’s going to marry. He would have preferred to put his skills to use in the private business sector, where prestige and money count, since he is painfully aware that both his girlfriend and the environment around him only see the “public sector” with disdain. It doesn’t pay well either. His new working life implies adjusting to a new set of values in which an old apartment in the city’s old town is coveted more than Mani’s new, expensive apartment in Skillebekk, and in which Mani’s regular kebab shop is “genuine” and ranks higher than the Theater Café. At the same time, Mani becomes a proud contributor to the great common project called The State. Yellow Book is a novel about class and belonging, about the lives we live and what frames them. It is also a tale about where we come from and where we’re going. It’s a long way from Haugenstua to the heart of government.
