Hachemi Living Things

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80427-088-2
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

Living Things follows four recent graduates - Munir, G, Ernesto and Álex - who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living on a campsite, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. A genre-bending and dystopian eco-thriller, Living Things is a punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, heralding an exciting new voice in international fiction. 

Munir Hachemi's career as a writer began with him selling his stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. He is the author of Living Things (2018) and El árbol viene [The Coming of the Tree] (2023), and is also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, he appeared on Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hachemi, Munir

Weitere Mitwirkende

Sanches, Julia

Leseproben

II. MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

The car was parked on the street where three out of the four of us lived. The boot was open, and we were loading in our luggage while waiting for G. His being late surprised us less than the amount of stuff he had with him. He’d brought a flamenco guitar, a backpack full of books, and a load of random equipment that, if I’m remembering correctly, he’d found at his grandfather’s farm. We all laughed at the beekeeping gloves, the coveralls, the ridiculously high boots. That day – this much is true – everything made us laugh. For example, we cracked up when we noticed we had each packed at least one instrument. Keep in mind that Ernesto was a pretty serious guy, Alejandro wished he was, and G – probably the smartest of us four – lived and breathed militant Marxism the way some people do literature, that is, like a rare sin of youth, a categorical decision he didn’t remember making. It’s possible he kept analyzing things while we laughed. It’s possible he laughed with us while also thinking about how it wasn’t really a coincidence, that at the end of the day the four musicians in question were four middle-class guys (lower-middle, in his case; middle-middle in mine and Álex’s; upper-middle in Ernesto’s – in any event, back then everyone in Spain belonged to some variation of the middle class unless proven otherwise), that three of us had read the same subject at university – you’ll have guessed which of us by now – and, in short, that sociology had already concluded our similarities would far outweigh our differences. To the series of points G could have made, I’d add one that I knew about at the time but didn’t have the courage to voice: not one of us was travelling for financial gain.

It’s a well-known fact that all modern fiction is born out of market tension. Becoming an author entails acquiring money and fame, yet the line between the moment a person becomes an author and the moment, in so doing, they cease to be one is tenuous. Equally well-known is the theory that below the surface of every story lies another, purportedly deeper tale. This text – which is not a short story – does not have to fit this theory, while our life – a story we constantly tell ourselves – does. In a short piece by Hemingway – an author I otherwise despise – there is a couple arguing in a hotel room. The woman sees a cat on the street, I can’t remember whether before – while they were taking a walk or having a drink – or in that moment – through the window. The second iteration is superior by far, but this being a Hemingway story, the jury’s still out. Anyway. She wants to rescue the cat; he thinks doing so would be madness and offers a couple of far-fetched excuses. They argue. They don’t reach an agreement, and he gets his way – when there’s a draw, inertia always trumps action – and the cat stays on the street. She cries a bit. They lie down on opposite sides of the bed, back to back.

I doubt I’ve told the story right. The beauty or practicality of the iceberg theory, as some people call it, is that you can change the surface of a story – the metaphorical tip of the iceberg – without changing the overall meaning. The story underneath this piece by Hemingway is so plain you’ve surely worked it out by now: the cat is the child the couple will never have.

Story A in our case – the tip of the iceberg – had to do with money: we were travelling to the south of France for work. Saying it was about money also establishes that it was about our various literary aspirations, given that modern-day authors are always in pursuit of financial stability, a thing impossible to find. Yet, our story could also be seen as just another episode in an overarching narrative that existed in Spain at the time, which made it so that young men and women were forced to choose between three options. Namely, spending the summer mixing drinks at some beach bar on the Mediterranean coast, moving to London to make sandwiches or look after some adorable brat and – theoretically – learn English, or harvesting grapes in the south of France. Option three most aligned with our interests, since it would also help us meet several of the demands placed on young middle-class men back then: being lean and tanned, doing some form of manual labour (this is key, as it adds a whiff of social legitimacy to the CV of any middle-aged professor or lawyer – the cliché being ‘I too lived through tough times and had no choice but to work hard’), being financially solvent, etc. In a way, harvesting grapes would allow us to cultivate a future, or story for the future, but most of all (for me at least, or the person I was then), it was a volatile, hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined in the word experience.

Experience, we all know, is the sine qua non for creating literature. While I may not subscribe to the belief myself, the fact remains that this truism has permeated every literary decalogue in the field. Bolaño, for example – reading Bolaño being one of the unwritten commandments – declared that ‘a short-story writer should be brave’ and dive in headfirst. Piglia claimed his lifestyle defined his literary style. Augusto Monterroso urged young writers to ‘make the most of every disadvantage, whether insomnia, imprisonment or poverty; the first gave us Baudelaire, the second Silvio Pellico, and the third all your writer friends; avoid sleeping like Homer, living easily like Byron, or making as much money as Bloy.’ (I’ve always thought that last one should be ‘Bioy’ – although, unlike Léon Bloy, Bioy Casares didn’t so much ‘make’ money as have money.) With time and the proliferation of notes I jotted down in journals, diaries, and on scraps of paper, I developed my own decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital:

1. A short-story writer should be brave. Drop everything and dive in headfirst.
2. Make the most of every disadvantage, whether insomnia, imprisonment or poverty; the first gave us Baudelaire, the second Silvio Pellico, and the third all your writer friends; avoid sleeping like Homer, living easily like Byron, or making as much money as Bloy.
3. Remember that writing isn’t for cowards, but also that being brave isn’t the same as not feeling afraid; being brave is feeling afraid and sticking it out, taking charge, going all in.
4. Don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve opened your eyes underwater, unless you’ve screamed underwater with your eyes wide open. Also, don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve burned your fingers, unless you’ve put them under the hot water tap and said, ‘Ahhh! This is much better than not getting burned at all.’
5. Be in love with your own life.
6. What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you’ve been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.
7. Try living abroad.
8. You’ve got to fuck a great many women / beautiful women / […] / drink more and more beer / […] attend the racetrack at least once.
9. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.
10. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.

The writers behind this advice – in strict disorder – are: Javier Cercas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Charles Bukowski, Hernán Casciari, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Augusto Monterroso. (Exercise: draw a line between each author and his advice.) As might be expected, all ten authors are men. In our culture, entrepreneurship, a spirit for adventure and self-advertising are qualities reserved for the male species. It’s not for nothing that sex workers have been tainted as ‘public women’, as opposed to ‘private women’, who are ‘good women’.  

If you think about it, the fact that these rules exist at all is evidence of a loss. During the Middle Ages it was possible to sing ballads about the end of experience and – more importantly – from the end of experience: i.e. prison. I’m talking about ‘The Prisoner’s Ballad’, which begins ‘in May, it was in May, when the weather is warm’, and (in its most famous iteration) tells a story in sixteen verses about a man who knows when it’s night and when it’s day thanks to the little bird that visits him like clockwork, until it is eventually slain by an archer. The ballad in question could easily have been written by someone with no real experience, since it doesn’t narrate experience so much as a human being’s primal experience: an awareness of solar cycles. Had a speaker not been implied in the language we...