Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Joseph Ponthus, Black Inc., $27.99.
A multi-award-winning French bestseller that brings poetry to the factory floor.
“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.”
In this celebrated 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 with 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.
It’s an autobiography, a story, about an intellectual with a career in social work in Paris who can’t find a job in his field, having moved to Brittany for love. He is forced to sell his labour as a casual worker in the local food-processing industry.
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. He finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire.
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.
Nothing could be further from postcard Brittany, whose ‘wild nature, hazy skies, mysterious language, and inhabitants inspired a Romantic generation of poets in search of an exotic fix without the hassle of leaving the Hexagon.’
Smee says the “prose poem charts the never-ending challenges of working on the production line, the rhythms of rage and exhaustion, and the attempt, in writing, to preserve one’s humanity in such an environment. It is one of the most powerful works I have read, urgent and necessary”.
