Crushed by the system

Here are two somewhat different accounts about living under a repressive regime, Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums and Ma Jian's Beijing Coma. Muller's prose is excellent, of course, Ma Jian's very plain. It would be interesting to know how many of the students whose life is followed in Beijing Coma are actually based on real people.

What about accounts of people crushed by capitalism? Maybe Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. In Paris, Orwell works as a dishwasher and visits his local tavern, where the waitress has not had a day off for years. At least something has changed in European working life during the last 80 years. Today, we are only enslaved by e-mails and mobile phone calls 7 days a week..