In Baglin’s debut, narrator Claire intercuts her chronicle of a summer spent working at a fast-food restaurant in Normandy when she’s 20 with episodes from her childhood in a working-class family.
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.
