On the Line

Book excerpt: Factory you shall never have my soul I am here And I count for so much more than you And I count so much more because of you Thanks to you Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces created by his insistent return to a new line of text – mirroring his continued return to the production line – we discover the woman he loves, the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the smell of the sea. In this French bestseller, translated by Stephanie Smee, Ponthus captures the mundane, the beautiful and the strange, writing with an elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast to the blood and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line (À la ligne) is a poet’s ode to manual labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable. Winner of: Grand Prix RTL-Lire, Prix Régine Deforges, Prix Jean Amila-Meckert, Prix du premier roman des lecteurs des bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris, Prix Eugène Dabit du roman populiste ‘From the uniformity and repetition of the production line Joseph Ponthus finds humour, grace and humanity. A unique and deeply affecting novel.’ —Ryan O’Neill