"A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action, this vibrantly written debut is narrated by a man who runs a high-speed train in France-a story born out of the author's experience as a real-life train driver. Driver begins as a contemporary apprentice tale: the narrator, a young man from the provinces, comes to Paris and enrolls in a course to become a train driver. As he discovers the train and its workings, from its internal machinery to its operative head, he is transported into a world both technical and poetic, with its own laws and codes, its own specialized language, its heroes and legends, its passions and boredoms, its dangers. Drawing from his experience of nearly two decades as a train driver, Mattia Felice constructs a propulsive narrative of meals scarfed down on the go, of solitude and sleepless nights, accidents and breakdowns, conversations with friends and solidarity with fellow workers. His train, like the ship in Moby-Dick, becomes a microcosm for life itself. Driver is a book about work, about the romance of the rails, but also about the tedium and intensity of doing such a job day in and day out, as well as the workers' continual struggle to improve their working conditions through strikes and protests. The language of Driveris as eclectic and vibrant as the world the train workers inhabit: Filice's novel blends prose with verse, and brims with technical terms, inside jokes, abbreviations, quotations, and snatches of non-French languages spoken by the train workers. Unsentimental but full of feeling, wonderfully voiced and rhythmic, Driver is a stirring ode to the power of the collective"-- Provided by publisher.
A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action, this vibrantly written debut is narrated by a man who runs a high-speed train in France—a story born out of the author’s experience as a real-life train driver.
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 susprising 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.
