Living Things - by Munir Hachemi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION

FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD

This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.

Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing...

"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." - Dizz Tate, author of Brutes

"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." - James Greer, author of Bad Eminence

"Gorgeously labyrinthine." - Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

Review Quotes

"Munir Hachemi is trying to tell this story of living things caught up in the gears of profit, of human hungers, of all the mechanisms of atrocity running in the background of our daily lives." - Xiao Yue Shan, Cleveland Review of Books

"Living Things doesn't try to shove anything down its readers' throats, though it places a lot at their doorstep and indirectly asks them to do some heavy lifting to understand it." - Nick Hilbourn, Rain Taxi

"As an essay on the antinomies of autofiction--and those of its foundation, the literary economy of "experience"--Living Things is wry and incisive." - Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, Chicago Review

"Living Things is a slim, beguiling novel that belongs on a shelf alongside works by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. It is both a serious meditation on art and modern food systems and a progressively mischievous exploration of form."- Literary Review of Canada

"[U]pstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation ... Hachemi's documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go." - Rob Doyle, The New York Times

"Living Things is by turns cool and frantic, dissociated and visceral, and all the more unsettling for it. Animal cruelty becomes mundane, sandwiched between minutely rendered, lengthy and genuinely funny accounts of negotiations over where to sleep, what to eat, the everyday stuff of life." - Sadie Graham, The Toronto Star

"Living Things is a socioeconomic critique of industrial agriculture, but can also be read as Cronenberg-style body horror. As a means of necessity, we are living things that eat other living things. It makes for tortured ethical decisions we will forever have to wrestle and understand. But we have to eat, we have to ear a paycheck, despite the bio-ethical implications and consequences. Living Things wrestles with these questions, albeit in a way shot through with humor and personal conviction" - The Driftless Area Review

"Told from journal entries and written almost as a survivor's tale, Living Things is filled to the brim with no fluff commentary on immigration, capitalism, and literature. Four college friends head down to the South of France to work on a grape farm for the summer, an idyllic situation for four men with no real post-grad ambition. But this facade comes crashing down very quickly after they arrive, and realize they will be working in nightmarish factory conditions amongst many other modern horrors. Coach House translations are always such a treat and veer on the absurd and experimental, and this novel takes the cake for them. An absolute feat in translated fiction!" - Grace Sullivan, Fountain Books

"Four freshly-graduated, young men travel to France to take on a grape-picking gig, but they find themselves involved in something far more horrifying. Living Things poses as a journal written from the eyes of Munir Hachemi himself as he and his friends live in the squalor of a campsite, spending their days providing low-paying, painstaking labor for corrupt agencies. Even more unsettling are the continuous deaths of their coworkers, whose disappearances come with dark implications. What unfolds is a richly observant and meditative account of the friends' experiences with blistering allusion to lost morale as a result of capitalism in the form of Big Agriculture. I was entranced by Hachemi's words from beginning to end, his prose magnetic and gripping throughout this terrifying story edging close to realistic horror." - Changing Hands Bookstore

"A magnificent debut." - Eugenio Fuentes, La Nueva España

"Hachemi counterbalances the uneasy atmosphere with a constant, subtle underlying humour that feels like a burst of fresh air. Absurdity and latent danger, stirred up in a French heatwave by the naïve insouciance of a group of increasingly tense youths, create an absorbing, somewhat Kafkaesque mood ... [Hachemi] weaves a delicately disturbing tale that contains all the rage and disappointment of facing a reality where only helplessness is possible." - Gabi Martínez, La Vanguardia

"Living Things is a short novel that changes its skin - and almost its genre - in each of its eight parts ... A work of autofiction that not only defines the self against lived and narrated experience, but also functions as an indictment of social, political, sanitary and economic systems: of the meat industry as it exists today, of racism, of insecure work and financial precarity, and of the voracity at the heart of capitalism itself.... [T]he fact that this all happened to the author affects us not only as readers, but as human beings." - Carlos Zanón, El País

"An endless array of sounds and ideas reverberate through these pages, at times apocalyptic and at other times deceptively naïve." - Qué Leer

"Blending together allusions to Hemingway, Borges, Bolaño, Houellebecq and even Lenin, with reflections on Google, the true nature of the livestock industry, the ins and outs of temp work agencies, ecological stability, the free market and the paradoxes of diary-keeping, Munir Hachemi superimposes layers of reality with quasi-apocalyptic detours that reveal the menace underlying seemingly banal situations." - María Teresa Lezcano, Diario Sur

"From the outset [of Living Things], the first person narration is interwoven with a multitude of meta-literary and philosophical reflections that eventually form a rich second skin, a subterranean engine through which the real story, beyond the descriptions of escapades and setbacks, begins to be understood. A magnificent debut." - Eugenio Fuentes, La Nueva España

About the Author

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 Tree Comes) (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.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.