"Monday, 29 July

I’ve made some money and gone vegan. We’ve been here for three weeks, yet the implications of this job only sank in this morning. In the postmodern age, horror is not a holocaust, but something far more intimate and painstaking. I’ve reread some of my journal entries and get the sense horror may actually be a metaphor for something else."

Living Things is Julia Sanchez’s translation of Cosas vivas by Munor Hachemi.

The novel is based on a real-life trip from Spain to France the author took in his early 20s with three friends, G., Alejandro (Alex) and Ernesto, originally with the plan of working on the grape harvest. Three of the four also had plans to turn their experiences into literary texts - from an interview:

"It was a shared project between three of the protagonists. The idea was that each of us would write a text, of whatever genre, about the trip we had made together, and then publish a volume with the three texts. G began a story several times that he finally destroyed. Alex ended up writing a science fiction novel about delivery men in China, and l Cosas vivas. I have always thought that this story perfectly defines the three of us. Even for the one who didn’t write anything."

However due to a bad harvest, there is no work picking grapes and the author/narrator and his friends are sucked into the world of factory farming, first battery hens and then later genetically modified plants. And a world of both zero-hours type contracts, poor working conditions and the mysterious death of some of their co-workers.

This is a self-aware text, the author insisting on the reality, without embellishment, of the story he tells while simulteneously adding meta-fictional commentary rooted in literary fiction, particularly that of Latin America. Even the idea of using the road-trip experience to derive literature comes from aphorisms he has collated from various authors:

"With time and the proliferation of notes I jotted down in journals, diaries, and scraps of paper, I developed my own decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital:

I. A short-story writer should be brave. Drop everything and dive in headfirst.

II. Make the most of every disadvantage, whether insomnia, imprisonment or poverty; the first gave us Baudelaire, the second Silvio Pellico, and the third all your writer friends; avoid sleeping like Homer, living easily like Byron, or making as much money as Bloy.

III. Remember that writing isn’t for cowards, but also that being brave isn’t the same as not feeling afraid; being brave is feeling afraid and sticking it out, taking charge, going all in.

IV. Don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve opened your eyes underwater, unless you’ve screamed underwater with your eyes wide open. Also, don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve burned your fingers, unless you’ve put them under the hot water tap and said, ‘Ahhh! This is much better than not getting burned at all.’

V. Be in love with your own life.

VI. What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you’ve been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.

VII. Try living abroad.

VIII. You’ve got to fuck a great many women / beautiful women / […] / drink more and more beer / […] attend the racetrack at least once.

IX. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

X. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.

The writers behind this advice – in strict disorder – are: Javier Cercas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Charles Bukowski, Hernán Casciari, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Augusto Monterroso. (Exercise: draw a line between each author and his advice.) As might be expected, all ten authors are men. In our culture, entrepreneurship, a spirit for adventure, and self-advertising are qualities reserved to the male species."

As for the exercise, the first is Bolaño, the second Monterroso and the rest are left as an exercise for the reader of this review.

Similarly the chapter names are the titles, in English translation, of novels by Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Desnoes, Cristina Morales, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and Kurt Vonnegut respectively (Morales novel as yet untranslated hence the “Or” in the chapter title, and Vonnegut’s of course written in English).

The narration is largely in journal form, an example entry reading - with Piglia's ‘¿cómo narrar el horror de los hechos reales?’ a key motivation for the text:

"Sunday, 14 July

I read Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory from start to finish. An unexpected surprise. It’s a social novel where the main character – a guy – takes us through the ins and outs of the artistic field; there is no anecdote outside the field of cultural production (exactly!). The book was recommended by my ex-girlfriend Mónica, now a close friend. Her current boyfriend recommended it to her. I consider ringing her but don’t actually want to; besides, it’d be expensive and I’m not sure she’s read the book yet. Instead I call Marta, my current girlfriend, and realize I don’t have a lot to share. I say things are all right; I have no idea if she can tell it isn’t true. My mission to obtain experience, as I referred to it, has been a failure. I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?

We’re running out of food."

Or the entry that opens my review, written as the horrors of the experience sink in.

The blurb bills this as “a literary eco-thriller, a punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream”. And the author/narrator also references both works:

"Before starting a story, I always reached for one on the shelf. Depending on what I wanted to write, on the genre and tone, I might pull out Ficciones or The Savage Detectives or The Past or Historia Argentina or Fever Dream or Pequeña flor . Those and a handful of other volumes were the ones that inspired me, or better still, saturated me. They weren’t my top ten so much as books that made me want to write (what a feeling, wanting to write) and warmed up my brain (warm up in the sense of a runner who limbers up their muscles before running the biggest race of their lives)."

However the comparison to Schweblin is more notable for the contrast than for the similarities. Whereas her novel was genuinely horrifying (one of only a handful of novels I have read that literally gave me nightmares) and firmly occupied the middle-ground of Todorov's "the fantastic", here there is a relatively benign explanation for the deaths and certain other happenings, as the author/narrator acknowledges:

"Reality always fails writers, and back then three out of the four of us thought ourselves writers. There was always Story B, even though it turned out to be nothing like any of the versions we could have come up with. Throughout the past week, on our drives in the Suzuki Swift and during down-time at le camping , we’d hashed out several conspiracies, discussed the relationship between the antibiotic shots, les champignons, the genetically modified maize and the high incidence of cancer in the West, offered incest and rape as explanations for the family ties between Hank Scorpio and Élodie, and concluded that everyone who found out about the link between the chickens and the corn was wished away with Muhammad’s help; in short, we had invented a Story B that wound up as a cover for Story C, which is the real story, the story Abdelkader told us and that I translated for my friends and for the Catalans and turned out to be far less surprising but also infinitely worse, because horror is a soft, sticky thing – never effusive, never a bang. There was no mystery, no case, and therefore no novel."

The political, rather than literary, nature of the work was disappointing. The topic of the meat industry has been done rather better including by other Fitzcarraldo novels. And a novel about the exploitation of labour in the capitalist system would be more resonant if it wasn’t written from the perspective of a group of feckless middle-class students, looking for summer work, to top up the amount they already get from their parents, to finance an overseas road-trip, one they ultimately mean as material for a literary work.

Worthwhile - 3 stars (3.5 rounded down)

Living Things is about the nature of stories and their tellers, the craft (or absence of craft - the organic, unlaboured, matter-of-fact recounting of real events) of writing, and how our memories may be both the revelation and distortion of the truth. Weaving together thoughts on literature and philosophy, tumultuous friendships, mysterious deaths, and the bloody slaughter of animals, the novel plays with structure, narrative, and form - although largely told through the journal entries of our author-narrator, interspersions and metafictional comments leads the reader to wonder how reliable or "real" such a tale really is.

Although the style of the prose was strong, and the story itself compelling, something about this failed to resonate with me - I couldn't quite put my finger on why, but the text's ambiguity and its detached, distant address perhaps led to a lack of connection between myself and the narrator.

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for my free e-ARC!

Living Things starts with a brief discursion about short stories and writing, which concludes "this text is only a book inasmuch as everything is a book. That's it. There is no intent, just storytelling. Embellishment degree zero." After this, a summer trip of four Spanish young men to France to pick grapes gradually becomes more unnerving, as they end up working on disturbing chicken farms and living on an increasingly threatening campsite, as the book threatens to turn into a slightly warped thriller.. As a short novel, it packs a lot in, including a whole set of literary allusions. Of course, the suggested lack of embellishment is a device - diary entries are ordered, embellished and comments on, but it does get at some of the apparent artlessness of the book and its inbuilt metacommentary (signalled by its ambiguous title). As the narrator writes at the end "storytelling... is something we do on instinct wile the world falls to pieces around us." The book's ending side-steps this falling apart, which may disappoint some readers, but it is definitely worth looking out for further translations of Hachemi's work..

An incredibly constructed book which explores not only the nature of writing and its relationship to memory, but the connection between the horrors of reality and how we experience and tell them as a story. I loved the literary references and discussions on what makes a story, and how the constant insistence that Munir was not creating but telling created a sense of mistrust and unreliability through the whole book. The claustrophobia and horror I felt could have been dialled up to 11 and this is what the book was just missing for me.

The most striking aspect of this piece is undeniably its writing, which oscillates between intellectual romanticism and a sharp, matter-of-fact style. The narrator appears as a writer and as a participator recalling events from his own life. That perspective enables the writer to paint an interesting premise, where we as the reader are not quite sure where the narrators voice starts and where the writer of the story itself comes in. While the narrator presents himself and his friends as intellectuals, the unfolding narrative subtly reveals a contrasting reality, painting a candid picture of their collective immaturity and the complexities that arise when intellectual aspirations intersect with the rawness of youthful exuberance.
The story peaks in the last few pages, sadly feeling rushed. Even though the narrator forewarned us in the initial pages about the focus on realism in fiction and mundane stories, it was challenging not to hope for a more satisfying conclusion, given the expectations set by the narrative groundwork. The most interesting part of the story is definitely the exploration of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living beings.
The painted picture of industrial work with the use of sharp and short sentences was brutalist and strong. The language and writing style definitely delivered – for the story itself, although the genre bending was interesting felt flat at the end.