It all started with an industrial revolution and a strong vindication of the working class against the machine, Marx through. But it turns out that the machine learned and began to pull off subterfuges, trompe l'oeils, deceptions and a rampant individualism ideal for the dissolution of common wills. Today the machine is more dangerously similar to Skynet than to a noisy meccano to which to deliver hard days of work without any social regulation. And, honestly, one does not know what is worse ...
The thing is, I was working in a cannery back in the 90's when I read «All a man", from Tom wolfe. And now comes this other story of Joseph ponthus that complements the previous one with that class perspective and aspirations annihilated by willing systems of propitious victims. But this plot advances from a new focus that, despite not communing with what there is, makes us discover the ability to defeat the machine from the individual, escaping from its magnetism at every moment.
Synopsis
This is the diary of a worker, of a temporary worker, first in the fish canneries, later in the Breton slaughterhouses. Two years meticulously writing down what happens on the production line: the colleagues and the machines, the deafening noise, the eternal repetition of the factory rituals, the shift changes ... But also the Latin authors, and Dumas and Rabelais and Perec, and the poems of Apollinaire and the songs of Trenet, those daily parapets, those provisional victories in the face of what exhausts man and alienates him.
And after all, and in spite of everything, an invincible happiness to be and to be in the world, a non-negotiable happiness that adopts the name of his wife, the shape of his dog, the smell of the sea, the laxity of a festive Sunday. … From the line is a prose poem, a war notebook, a book of psalms, a parade of ox carcasses and tons of prawns, a complete inventory of the dreams and chains of the XNUMXst century working class.
You can now buy the novel "From the Line", by Joseph Ponthus, here: