MULTINATIONAL FINANCIAL COMPANY ACCOUNTING RISK MANAGEMENT | Anith Mukherjee
Full of Crow.
⇒If you can figure out why this story is titled, “Multinational Financial Company Accounting Risk Management,” I will award you every cent of profit this website makes for an entire year.
Which is to say, I will give you nothing other than perhaps kudos for solving the riddle of this story’s title.
I like this story a lot. It’s dark, enigmatic, oddly funny (not laugh-out-loud funny but strange-uncomfortable funny), and its narrative voice is very matter-of-fact, very blasé about the whole dark situation described in this piece.
Could the title be some sort of commentary on the state of the business world, particularly with regard to the whole bank-caused financial collapse we saw just five years ago? Could this be a story about culpability, or about (literally/metaphorically) getting away with murder?
I don’t know. That’s the sort of reading this incongruous title seems to invite, but I’m getting too hung up on the title right now.
The POV is very interesting in this story, sort of gliding in and out of the character’s head. We start with the line, “John killed a man today. He didn’t want to, it just kind of happened.” This free-indirect speech puts us, puts our narrator, in the middle of John’s thoughts. There are plenty of times in this story that we are given an idea of what John is thinking, either directly or indirectly, yet the story is far from transparent. Some of the reader’s biggest questions go unanswered, which I appreciate. When an author can get us to care about a situation about which we know next to nothing, that author is clearly quite skilled, their story quite successful.
⇒Read the story over at Full of Crow.