Living Thing by Munir Hachemi

Spanish fiction

0riginal title – Cosas vivas

Translator – Julie Sanches

Source – personal copy

I have missed several fitzcarradlo books over the last few years. So I decided to cancel a subscription and try to get some of the books I missed from their backlist. This is another writer from one of those Granta lists. Munir was on the 2021 list of the best Spanish language writers. His story of vital signs was part of that collection. The first book of Spanish writers produced so many great writers like Rodrigo Hasbun, Pola Ooixarac and Andres Neumann, to name a few. There have been a couple from the second collection that came out. I reviewed another book by the writer Martin Felipe Castagnet. Munir Hachemi’s father is from Algeria. He studied Spanish and has a master’s degree in Spanish. This was his debut novel. It is part auto-fiction, part dialogue on industrial farming.

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.

A mixof reading and the slow way the trip falls apart as the food goes and the still drink

The book follows what happens when four friends from university decide to head to France with the initial idea of joining the grape harvest.( I did something similar in Germany many years ago, working in a vineyard for a week. ) Munir, G, Ernesto and Alex head in a Suzuki Swift. Our Narrator, Munir, is full of ideas about being a writer. In the book’s first part, he describes how different writers describe being and how to start writing as they head for this summer of what they feel will be fun grape picking. But then, when they get there, they are told there isn’t any work in the vineyard to harvest grapes for four Spanish students. This shatters their plans, so they take what turns out to be a dark turn and find a chop in an industrial chicken factory where the four start to work and have their eyes open to the horrors of industrial-scale factory farming and the effect of this on the four of them. The co-workers’ menace and the place turn this from what would have been a fun summer working trip into something darker. As they drink, they become a little wild and don’t fit in on the family campsite they are living on, as the madness and horrific nature of the day job leads to wild nights. We see all this through Munir’s journal, but as he says earlier in the book, this is the writer; this is another Munir.

Today work has shown me the true nature of animal ex-ploitation. The site reminded me of the end of the world: a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field. In the background the sun rose, wanting to drown the world in the blistering co-lours of dawn but finding everything in that narrow space to be yellow or white, and nothing else. Access to the complex was through a pavilion-like annexe. We got in a queue, and a veterinarian handed each of us a soft plastic suit that looked like a giant, shiny white potato sack, and a headpiece made of the same material with a see-through window for the eyes. Then he sprayed us with some sort of disinfectant hose. The scene reminded me of Holocaust documentaries, except we weren’t so much naked as overdressed. They informed us we wouldn’t be able to leave until our (lunch) break at eleven-thirty. At first I was alarmed because I had to pee, but it took me less than an hour to sweat every last drop of water from my body. Even though I bore it out, I’d go so far as to say it was unbearable.

The descripition of where they end up working in the factory farm.

This is only 114 pages, but as you see, it has a lot more to it. The writer discovers his voice in the book by describing the books he loves and the four having a wild summer. Part criticism of the other nature and brutality of factory farming and its effect on the four of them. As we follow Munir’s journal of the summer. This had echoes of Bolano in many ways. The description of writers he loved reminds me of the love of poetry and poets in the first part of Savage Detectives. But then it vias into environmental and green issues around factory farming and the horrors he sees he compares at time to the way we looked at the holocaust pictures. This is a powerful debut from a writer who seems to love playing with the nature of his writing and the genre he is writing. This has auto-fiction, thriller, Bolano-like prose, and green themes all thrown into a hard-hitting short novella. Have you read any of the writers from the second collection of Spanish writers from Granta?

Winston’s score is a B. It is a solid debut novella that is fast-paced and can be read in a few hours.