In Deep Shit
Munir Hachemi, trans. Julia Sanchez, Living Things
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 114pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781804270875
reviewed by Peter Adkins
Meat eaters are bad readers. Or so the protagonist of Munir Hachemi’s debut novel, Living Things, comes to believe when, after a night working on an industrial chicken farm, he realises that his understanding of animal agriculture has rested on a false consciousness. The cheap cuts of meat that he had previously happily subsisted upon are in fact documents of barbarism and horror. In a novel preoccupied with the capacities of literature to confront the ruthlessness of the contemporary world and make some sense of it, veganism is a ‘necessary consequence’ of reading the world correctly.
Living Things, which has been translated from Spanish by Julia Sanchez tells the story of four young men, fresh out of university, travelling from Madrid to the south of France to work in the grape harvest. They are, the narrator tells us, travelling not for the money — indeed, except for one of them they continue to rely on their parents for financial support — but rather experience. The kind of experience that will give them the requisite depth to be men of the world and, in our protagonist’s case, a successful writer. In this respect they are extraordinarily fortunate: experience is served up to them on a silver platter, ultimately far more of it than they are able to stomach.
Arriving in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the friends discover that the grape harvest has been postponed until the autumn due to torrential rainfall. The local employment agency instead finds them work as labourers on the various poultry farms spread across the region. What follows is a predictably bleak series of events as they realise what it means to be itinerant workers in the brutal, and brutalising, agribusiness industry.
Living Things has been described both as eco-horror and autofiction (the protagonist shares Hachemi’s name, and the author has gone on record saying he really did spend a summer working on French poultry farms). It is a novel self-consciously preoccupied with literature’s ability to meaningfully intervene in how we understand the world, its frequent recourse to theories of literature and other authors woven into the fabric of the narrative.
The largely invisible industrial food production system that feeds most of the developed world has provided a particularly searing subject for writers looking to jolt readers from an uncritical relationship with what they eat. Examples range from Bong Joon-ho and Jon Ronson’s 2017 Netflix film Okja, about a breed of American superpigs developed by the greenwashing Mirando Corporation, to Joseph Ponthus’s verse novel, À la ligne: feuillets d’usine (2019), about the numbness of life working in Brittany’s fish processing plants and abattoirs (translated into English by Stephanie Smee as On the Line: Notes from a Factory in 2021).
Hachemi joins this trend, blending the comic and horrific into a kind of literary grotesque that viscerally renders the realities for both the humans and animals caught up within industrial systems of exploitation: the suck of the narrator’s Zoo York trainers as they sink into a floor deep with chicken shit, while he desperately tries to harden himself to his role grabbing panicked chickens, is but one example of Hachemi’s ability to find the exact detail that can bring a scene to life.
The shoes are an important detail in terms of narrative structure, too. Nobody has told the young Spaniards that they need to buy their own work equipment. After a horrendous first night of work, made worse by the fact that they’ve not been provided with overalls, they discover that there is only one shop in town selling workwear and everything is ‘insanely expensive’. The intersections of economic exploitation, animal cruelty and environmental contamination lays bare the realities behind the cheap meat stacked up in supermarkets.
What sets Living Things apart from these other works is the way Hachemi doesn’t just pull back the façade of modern farming but is also similarly willing to present the ugliness of his four protagonists. Hachemi’s alter-ego and his three friends are chauvinistic and self-absorbed. Closer to gap-year students than their fellow labourers, they are in no way representative of those for whom life on the disassembly line is their life. They trash their campsite with little regard for the labourers and tourists also camped there. They devise a racist nickname for the North African man who also works for the agency, projecting onto him orientalised suspicions of maleficence. Women are seen in terms of their bodies first and foremost, only a few degrees removed from the animals being processed on the poultry farms. And when they run out of money, their parents bail them out.
This ugliness doesn’t go unchallenged. Hachemi’s vegan conversion arrives as an awakening in which the narrator experiences something akin to a moment of moral growth. In a similar way, their evaluation of their North African co-worker is revealed at the novel’s end to not only be grotesquely incorrect, but an indirect factor in his death.
The unvarnished presentation is of a piece with the narrator’s commitment to changing nothing in his retelling of events, or ‘embellishment degree zero’ as he terms it, and reflects the novel’s self-conscious engagement with literary theories rooted in authenticity and directness. Yet even this theorising doesn’t stand outside of the novel’s troubling gender politics. Apart from a fleeting reference to the Spanish writer Cristina Morales, all the authors and theorists the protagonist reads and meditates on are male. Certainly, this can be read as intended to be another of the narrator’s blind spots rather than the author’s own biases, but it becomes a more crucial question given the novel’s presentation of women and its veneration for writers such as Michel Houellebecq and Charles Bukowski (both of whom are cited in the novel as influences, with the latter’s injunction that to be a great writer ‘You’ve got to fuck a great many women’, appearing in the protagonist’s self-compiled decalogue that he strives to live by).
The uncertain location of irony and sincerity is, of course, constitutive of autofiction, as is unpalatable characters. Is, for instance, the misattributed quote from James Joyce that provides the book’s epigraph a self-ironising joke or a genuine error? Indeed, it’s hard to know how to process Hachemi’s debut. One option is to consume it raw, savouring the sheer bravado of the prose and to accept that, as the narrator suggests at one point, there ‘are no morals to real-life stories’.
The other option is to try to peel away the myriad layers of irony to get to the flesh beneath, an approach that risks finding little of substance beyond well-drawn characters and descriptive set pieces. Beyond its vivid depiction of the realities to industrial agriculture, it is this interpretative dilemma that readers of Living Things will have to grapple with — meat-eaters and vegans alike.
Living Things, which has been translated from Spanish by Julia Sanchez tells the story of four young men, fresh out of university, travelling from Madrid to the south of France to work in the grape harvest. They are, the narrator tells us, travelling not for the money — indeed, except for one of them they continue to rely on their parents for financial support — but rather experience. The kind of experience that will give them the requisite depth to be men of the world and, in our protagonist’s case, a successful writer. In this respect they are extraordinarily fortunate: experience is served up to them on a silver platter, ultimately far more of it than they are able to stomach.
Arriving in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the friends discover that the grape harvest has been postponed until the autumn due to torrential rainfall. The local employment agency instead finds them work as labourers on the various poultry farms spread across the region. What follows is a predictably bleak series of events as they realise what it means to be itinerant workers in the brutal, and brutalising, agribusiness industry.
Living Things has been described both as eco-horror and autofiction (the protagonist shares Hachemi’s name, and the author has gone on record saying he really did spend a summer working on French poultry farms). It is a novel self-consciously preoccupied with literature’s ability to meaningfully intervene in how we understand the world, its frequent recourse to theories of literature and other authors woven into the fabric of the narrative.
The largely invisible industrial food production system that feeds most of the developed world has provided a particularly searing subject for writers looking to jolt readers from an uncritical relationship with what they eat. Examples range from Bong Joon-ho and Jon Ronson’s 2017 Netflix film Okja, about a breed of American superpigs developed by the greenwashing Mirando Corporation, to Joseph Ponthus’s verse novel, À la ligne: feuillets d’usine (2019), about the numbness of life working in Brittany’s fish processing plants and abattoirs (translated into English by Stephanie Smee as On the Line: Notes from a Factory in 2021).
Hachemi joins this trend, blending the comic and horrific into a kind of literary grotesque that viscerally renders the realities for both the humans and animals caught up within industrial systems of exploitation: the suck of the narrator’s Zoo York trainers as they sink into a floor deep with chicken shit, while he desperately tries to harden himself to his role grabbing panicked chickens, is but one example of Hachemi’s ability to find the exact detail that can bring a scene to life.
The shoes are an important detail in terms of narrative structure, too. Nobody has told the young Spaniards that they need to buy their own work equipment. After a horrendous first night of work, made worse by the fact that they’ve not been provided with overalls, they discover that there is only one shop in town selling workwear and everything is ‘insanely expensive’. The intersections of economic exploitation, animal cruelty and environmental contamination lays bare the realities behind the cheap meat stacked up in supermarkets.
What sets Living Things apart from these other works is the way Hachemi doesn’t just pull back the façade of modern farming but is also similarly willing to present the ugliness of his four protagonists. Hachemi’s alter-ego and his three friends are chauvinistic and self-absorbed. Closer to gap-year students than their fellow labourers, they are in no way representative of those for whom life on the disassembly line is their life. They trash their campsite with little regard for the labourers and tourists also camped there. They devise a racist nickname for the North African man who also works for the agency, projecting onto him orientalised suspicions of maleficence. Women are seen in terms of their bodies first and foremost, only a few degrees removed from the animals being processed on the poultry farms. And when they run out of money, their parents bail them out.
This ugliness doesn’t go unchallenged. Hachemi’s vegan conversion arrives as an awakening in which the narrator experiences something akin to a moment of moral growth. In a similar way, their evaluation of their North African co-worker is revealed at the novel’s end to not only be grotesquely incorrect, but an indirect factor in his death.
The unvarnished presentation is of a piece with the narrator’s commitment to changing nothing in his retelling of events, or ‘embellishment degree zero’ as he terms it, and reflects the novel’s self-conscious engagement with literary theories rooted in authenticity and directness. Yet even this theorising doesn’t stand outside of the novel’s troubling gender politics. Apart from a fleeting reference to the Spanish writer Cristina Morales, all the authors and theorists the protagonist reads and meditates on are male. Certainly, this can be read as intended to be another of the narrator’s blind spots rather than the author’s own biases, but it becomes a more crucial question given the novel’s presentation of women and its veneration for writers such as Michel Houellebecq and Charles Bukowski (both of whom are cited in the novel as influences, with the latter’s injunction that to be a great writer ‘You’ve got to fuck a great many women’, appearing in the protagonist’s self-compiled decalogue that he strives to live by).
The uncertain location of irony and sincerity is, of course, constitutive of autofiction, as is unpalatable characters. Is, for instance, the misattributed quote from James Joyce that provides the book’s epigraph a self-ironising joke or a genuine error? Indeed, it’s hard to know how to process Hachemi’s debut. One option is to consume it raw, savouring the sheer bravado of the prose and to accept that, as the narrator suggests at one point, there ‘are no morals to real-life stories’.
The other option is to try to peel away the myriad layers of irony to get to the flesh beneath, an approach that risks finding little of substance beyond well-drawn characters and descriptive set pieces. Beyond its vivid depiction of the realities to industrial agriculture, it is this interpretative dilemma that readers of Living Things will have to grapple with — meat-eaters and vegans alike.