Charlie Taylor

Exchanging Spain for picking grapes in rural France, Munir Hachemi’s Living Things recounts a summer spent by four bookish undergraduates in trying to find ‘a volatile, hazy, ill-defined thing’ ostensibly the ephemeral quality of: ‘experience’. However, in their quest to find something noteworthy to write about, the four friends find themselves face to face with the grinding cogs of contemporary capitalism.

Avoiding literary trickery for cold-hard realism, the narrator (also called Munir) boldly announces that the book: ‘is only a book inasmuch as everything is a book. That’s it. There is no intent, just storytelling. Embellishment degree zero.’ The preface turns into a kind of literary counterpoint – a lengthy double-bluff by an inconsistent narrator steeped in Bolaño, Borges, and Marxism. Following lengthy digressions encompassing Hemmingway, Monerroso, Piglia, and Kerouac, Munir unveils a ‘decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital,’ a theory by which artistic production, self-actualisation, and experience are seemingly tied to the commodification of free time.

Is this just a narrative sleight of hand? Or does this meta-justification work in recounting a summer of discontent? Hachemi is not entirely clear. Made up of a series of contemporary diary entries, save for occasional breaks, the suspicion of interpretation continues throughout, even presenting the reader with a direct warning that the following is an attempt to ‘tell you my story – the real story, what actually happened.’

Upon arriving in the rural village of Aire sur-l’adour the four friends find out that the grape harvest has been cancelled, due to poor weather ruining the crop. Unsure what to do, and now stuck in an expensive campsite overrun by holidaymakers and families, the four discuss Borges, Kerouac, and Bukowski while smoking pot and drinking cheap wine. Eventually, they find temporary employment via a local Association Solidarité Travail, in which they are subsequently sent to work on a battery chicken farm.

An assortment of precarious and underpaid jobs follow. These include: grabbing chickens and placing them into a wheeled cage, filling ducks with feed to bloat their gullets and explode their livers, to vaccinating birds and injecting them with dangerous hormones. The whole enterprise must move quickly. They drive at double the speed limit since they are paid by the kilometre not by the hour. The agency has even bribed the local gendarmerie to avoid them fining the speeding workers.

Since returning late at night smelling of chickenshit has drastically decreased their favourability among the local holidaymakers, and the harrowing experience of the chicken farm has turned Munir vegan, the four defect to a rival agency in search of better hours and more regular pay. Stumbling into a job with Synngate, a global mega corporation with a local factory, things immediately look up. Futuristic offices, air-conditioning, and free coffee are a considerable upgrade on the henhouse.

Paid to inject experimental maize with infected parasites, the weirdness of their tasks, and the wider environment, including working alongside orphans employed from the local Navy college, leads to attempts to piece together the true nature of their work. The four even begin to attempt to sabotage operations, rebelling against what they see as a horrific, possibly ungodly, expansion of late-stage capital.

When workers at AST start to turn up dead, or vanish, the four are left with even more questions. Hunting around for answers, deep in rural France, they begin to piece together a series of conspiracies made up of independent connections between scientific experimentation, finance, and labour. Instead, all they find is a history of cover-ups and exploited labour, of forgotten workers and parasitic hierarchies.

Munir’s diary continues to break off, both with a series of lengthier digressions and self-reflections, but one which continually refutes the idea of a prescient moment of youthful self-actualisation. Experience is one thing, but facing the cold facts of the world’s material processes is something else. Instead of finding stories, the world for the first time emerges to the four friends as distinctly uncomplicated: built upon a web of exploitation and precarity.

The early Borgesian fantasies of the young protagonists becomes exactly that – fantasy. If, as Munir mentions at the beginning of the book, the ‘purpose of stories is to classify to impose order and hierarchy on the real world,’ the only sequence of events which is really unearthed are the complex double-binds on the fringes of the economic system. If reality continues to be ever aloof, an ever-unknowable, unmappable thing, then the underworld of rural France reads less as fiction but completely detached from it. Munir discovers a place without stories.
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Charlie Taylor is a writer from Suffolk.