In her piercing first novel, On the Clock, French writer Claire Baglin declines the cushions of either whimsy or metaphor – she cuts right to the bone ... Unfiltered ...
Baglin’s canvas is compactly controlled; her tightly cut scenes have a cinematic specificity. There’s barely a hint of exposition, yet she’s able to condense the humiliations of a lifetime into a few spare lines ... Oozes with poignancy and desperation ... The scenes in the fast-food joint drive the narrative forward with the power of a dynamo, and Baglin’s prose – beautifully translated by Jordan Stump – is as crisp as the fries fresh from the oil ... Baglin never loses focus on the damage these jobs inflict on ordinary people’s bodies ... One of the paciest and most gripping pieces of prose I’ve encountered in a while – and a lesson to us all.
Assured ... An affecting portrait of an ordinary, working-class French family ... Wonderfully evocative ... Fluidly translated by Jordan Stump ... Direct, unadorned prose ... Baglin seamlessly segues these alternating narratives, contrasting and finding parallels in the father-daughter experiences, and exploring the subtle markers of wealth with wry humour ... A compact, unexpectedly rich exploration of ordinary lives, ruled by the punch clock, and Baglin encapsulates how quickly alienation and a sense of powerlessness take hold when mindless work robs a person of their self-respect.
Gives a new level of detail to the realities of blue-collar labor ... Baglin emphasizes the subjectivity of her narrator, describing her workplace in as much detail as American novels set in office buildings. Seen through the narrator’s eyes, the fast-food restaurant’s employees lose their generic anonymity and gain a sense of individuality. By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore.
Fastidiously clipped prose ... There’s a message here about labor, precarity, and alienation: a muted, distant longing, as when you remember a Christmas present you really wanted as a kid but never got. But it feels sketched in ... I was irked by Baglin’s refusal to identify the restaurant, its flagship product, etc. It felt critically important to know whether I was under the Golden Arches or not. The novel’s semihallucinatory tone called for the monotonous, demoralizing exactitude of a trademark.
An impressionistic portrait...in brisk but unsparing prose ... It can all get a bit confusing. Events and timelines are hazy, as if told from a fragmented child’s viewpoint ... Simmering tensions stay inexplicit ... Baglin expertly captures the giddiness of the working day, her writing percussive ... has a rhythm that takes getting used to and I did find Baglin’s digressions strayed too much from the propulsive kitchen-set story. But the novel is underscored by a lacerating humour, even in its bleakest passages, and offers a refreshingly uncompromising study of working-class life ... A terse, bracing whirlwind of a book.
Concise and arresting ... In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints a portrait of her family’s struggles with poverty ... The simplicity of the prose only enhances the harrowing story as Baglin juxtaposes the kindhearted Jérôme’s bitterness over his 20 years of factory labor with Claire’s immersion into her own grueling workdays. Readers will be stirred.
