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On the Clock by Claire Baglin review – a fast food novel for a refined palette
Tensions sizzle alongside burgers in the hazy timelines and brisk prose of the French writer’s disorienting debutIn recent novels set in restaurants, the breakneck speed of the action hides darker elements at work. Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher follows a restaurant worker whose life threatens to unravel amid his gambling addiction; in Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back, the world of waitressing is a front for Texas’s grimy underbelly. Beneath the surface frenzy of French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock (translated by Jordan Stump), there is a similar stream of existential angst, its protagonist “mired in the heart of pointlessness”.Baglin’s focus is intergenerational exploitation in the (French) workplace. She gives an impressionistic portrait of a young woman employed at a burger joint in brisk but unsparing prose, alternating between her unnamed narrator’s customer-facing drudgery – unfriendly co-workers, pestering managers, habitual injuries – and her childhood memories, particularly of her hot-tempered father, Jérôme, who toiled in a factory for 20 years.On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated by Jordan Stump) is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...
Tensions sizzle alongside burgers in the hazy timelines and brisk prose of the French writer’s disorienting debut
In recent novels set in restaurants, the breakneck speed of the action hides darker elements at work. Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher follows a restaurant worker whose life threatens to unravel amid his gambling addiction; in Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back, the world of waitressing is a front for Texas’s grimy underbelly. Beneath the surface frenzy of French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock (translated by Jordan Stump), there is a similar stream of existential angst, its protagonist “mired in the heart of pointlessness”.
Baglin’s focus is intergenerational exploitation in the (French) workplace. She gives an impressionistic portrait of a young woman employed at a burger joint in brisk but unsparing prose, alternating between her unnamed narrator’s customer-facing drudgery – unfriendly co-workers, pestering managers, habitual injuries – and her childhood memories, particularly of her hot-tempered father, Jérôme, who toiled in a factory for 20 years.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated by Jordan Stump) is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...
