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Driver

Driver

by Mattia Filice, translated from the French by Jacques Houis

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book Fiction French Literature
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Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681379883
Pages: 368
Publication Date:

Praise

Using his vivid imagination, his artist’s attention to detail, and his nearly 20 years of experience driving passenger and freight trains throughout France, Mattia Filice transmutes labor into literature…The novel’s seemingly random rhythms—the placement of line breaks, the way stories may develop over many pages or break off suddenly—replicate the way the ‘mandated time’ of the job prevents one from living or thinking at a natural tempo.
—Eric Vanderwall, Los Angeles Review of Books

Filice’s rhythmic and searching novel… amounts to a distinctive rendering of a young man’s effort to make meaning from his life.
—Publishers Weekly

The novel is a remarkable achievement of tone, acknowledging the crap aspects of the work…as well as its nobility…The terseness of the language and its irregular rhythms convey both a monotony and a relentless hurry – the need always to be somewhere else, and not a second late. In the nuanced world of Filice’s book, work is often resented but can also satisfy. And, at times… it can bring pure joy.
—Chris Power, The Observer

Mattia Filice's book reveals a style–the style of a writer unlike any other. He takes you on a spirited ride into the universe of rails, leaving one with an indelible vision of the contemporary condition of the working class.
—La tribune de Genève

Mattia Filice transforms his experience as a train driver into a huge epic fresco. Driver is a totally unexpected first novel.
—Les Inrockuptibles

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