First published in Spanish in 2018, “Living Things” is the debut novel by Munir Hachemi, who, we are told in the author bio, started out selling his stories in Madrid bars and was eventually named one of Granta’s best young Spanish-language novelists. That impetuous, upstart 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.
Our narrator, Munir, looks back at a remove of several years on a summer when he and his three friends, G, Alejandro and Ernesto, headed abroad to soak up “experience as literary capital.” Munir has repeatedly tried to write about the events that ensued, but this time he is determined to do so without embellishment. All the writers who came before him were frauds: Munir “will be the first to declare that the emperor has no clothes, the first to take the floor with the courage needed to flout the frills and artifice, the first to tell the story as it unfolded and nothing more.”
The author, of course, is bluffing; Hachemi’s is the sort of writing that compulsively interrogates itself as writing, in which literary theorizing runs alongside the storytelling. The chapters are named after novels, and the offhand prose, translated by Julia Sanches, bristles with bookish name-dropping and the kind of brash, blanket disparagement of other writers befitting an angry young man. With its pugnacious cocktail of machismo and literary posturing, “Living Things” lays offerings at the shrine of Roberto Bolaño — an author who is referred to more than once.
The four Madrileños drive to the south of France to spend the summer picking grapes. They don’t really need the money, but are middle-class labor tourists following their heroes Kerouac, Bukowski and Bolaño in getting their hands dirty, the better to wield their pens. When they arrive, however, they learn that the grape harvest has been called off because of excessive rainfall.
A local recruitment agency places them in a series of temp jobs at factories and animal-processing plants. The friends set up at a campsite amid families and couples, and drive long distances each morning to work for a few euros an hour in settings whose ghastliness is this novel’s strongest hand. Hachemi’s documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go. It really doesn’t read as literary adornment when the feckless Munir, after a single shift at a chicken-processing factory, instantly turns vegan. Intrigue stirs when co-workers begin to die in shadowy circumstances. In their quest for experience, the middle-class Spaniards glimpse the hell of the European proletariat.
The bulk of “Living Things” comprises diary entries that Munir claims he is rewriting from memory. It can be hard to know when the author is sending up his bolshy narrator and when he’s just pretentious and conceited. “I’m not your average narrator; I don’t arrange things or order them, I reveal myself,” Munir insists, but his quasi-sophisticated theorizing expresses only such truisms as: Reality isn’t like fiction, sometimes the facts overlay no deeper metaphoric sediment, and diaries omit as much as they record. And yet Hachemi’s haphazard ramblings — delivered as if by a stoned Roland Barthes — render the narrative content livelier than a simple, guileless account of slackers on the road.
Part of this novel’s fun, rough appeal is that Munir and his mates aren’t the genteel, hypersensitive types we’re more used to meeting in contemporary fiction, but plausibly loutish Spaniards who repeatedly trash their campsite, offend the other guests and spend the whole time smoking joints and guzzling beer. But they are not insensible to the low background hum of contemporary horror. By the end, Munir’s working holiday amid the wretched of the earth has left him with an ambivalent view of his own vocation. Storytelling, he concludes, “is something we do on instinct while the world falls to pieces around us.”