Living Things by Munir Hachemi and translated by Julia Sanches (Coach House Books, 2024; 139 pages) is many things: a satiric literary manifesto, a dystopian eco-thriller about factory farming and gmo foods, and a look at precarious employment. But mostly it’s a summer roadtrip novel.

A quartet of male friends leave Spain in a Suzuki Swift, heading to southern France with a vague plan to find employment in the summer grape harvest. From varying degrees of the middle class, our narrator insists they don’t need the work—they have literary pretensions, what they need is experience. A problem arises: the summer grape harvest has been delayed by rainfall until at least October. But not to worry, the operator of the temporary employment agency assures them there is plenty of work in the agricultural sector: les poulets, les canards, and les cailles.

If your French isn’t great—and don’t worry, our heroes seem pathologically incapable of improving theirs, and they’re starting out from Spanish—that’s chickens, ducks, and quails (“some bird I’d never seen before”), and it’s a world away from the romanticism of the grape harvest. Their working conditions go from bad—chasing ‘le poolé’ (les poulets) through a warehouse floor covered in chickenshit and feathers and forcing them into wheeled cages—to worse (“You have to use this thing that looks like a gas hose to ram food down the birds’ gullets until their livers explode or something”)—to positively dystopian: prying violent, panicked chickens from shelves of overpacked battery cages lit by neon lights and holding them still for vaccination. Living Things is receiving comparisons to Robert Bolaño, but a more appropriate comparison might be Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle by way of P.G. Wodehouse’s Ukridge. Think Love Among the Chickens without the love (the Belgian girl they fancy takes up with a German, instead).

If the poultry warehouse work sometimes seem so exaggerated that we begin to feel we’ve strayed into vaguely sci-fi/dystopian territory, the same cannot be said of the gig workers they encounter, who are beaten down and zoned out but amicable, if sometimes exasperated with the neophyte quartet. The work is a joke, but the workers have their dignity.

Yet what really makes the novel so satisfying is what louts the narrator and his companions are, possessing the kind of primal ignorance and boorishness that can really only be achieved by males in their twenties. Take, for instance, the sudden realization at the state of their camp site:

“the rest of us were collecting our things when we saw the owner of le camping striding in our direction. This is when it dawned on us that our campsite was revolting: strewn with cigarette butts and empty beer cans, while the air mattress – where I’d spent the night in a Decathlon sleeping bag – was covered in leaves and a brownish liquid that was a mix of dew and some coffee I’d spilled. The scattered cups and tins of food didn’t help. The campground owner was wearing a similar outfit to the day before (like a fisherman adrift on the moon) and the same imperishable smile. He said he wanted to talk to us (now that I think of it, he probably said he needed to talk to us). I pretended to translate while telling the others to start leaving like they were in a hurry. The owner of le camping tried to stop them but managed only to keep me for a few seconds. He said something about his long-lost youth, about how he too had been young or whatever, but he spoke so fast I had trouble parsing his words. I promised to talk to him about the springtime of his life later that evening, then left with feigned urgency.”

This ignorance encompasses not just the world but themselves: otherwise straightforward tasks are sabotaged by sugar highs, exhaustion, allergies, heatstroke, and a sort of withdrawal caused by suddenly going cold turkey on animal protein (“a condition exacerbated by my total ignorance about anything to do with nutrition, fat, and amino acids”). When their clothes reek of chicken after their first shift, they head to the river near their campsite, leaving their clothes on “so we can wash our bodies and garments at the same time.” The result is that their clothes now smell of damp chicken, but hey, it covers up the smell of urine from the tree they’ve been pissing on in lieu of walking all the way to the bathroom at night.

Is it any wonder their fellow campers hate them? Or that they are singularly unequipped to uncover the mystery of why their fellow temp workers keep dying at regular intervals?

Even their own camaraderie begins to sour as time passes, the inevitable outcome of too much time spent in each other’s company, a inevitable on any overly long roadtrip.

Two of the friends enter into a sort of running feud with each other, constantly bickering, while a third descends into giddy madness:

“At first he wouldn’t shut up about how hot Marie was, which I interpreted as a joke or a sign that he hadn’t rubbed one out or got laid in a long time. Then he started shouting what he thought were flirtatious remarks but were actually a smattering of words from his meagre French lexicon. He’d call out papillon or fleur as compliments, but also différence and pomme de terre. G had already caught Marie’s eye while she filled us in on what to do, and she flirted back to comments she saw as flattery and responded sportingly to what she chose to view as a joke or mistranslation (I guess she didn’t want to admit there was a nutcase on her team). The truth is I had a good laugh while G’s insanity escalated.”

As for the frequent deaths, here we have our summer roadtrip’s coming of age/loss-of-innocence moment: the quartet listens to conspiracy theories, debates them, develops a list of suspects, but in the end when the solution is presented to them it turns out there’s no need for a shadowy Epstein figure (or here: the agribusiness manager whose resemblance to The Simpsons’ Hank Scorpio becomes an in-joke for the fellas), rather capitalism’s pressure to continually hurry up takes its inevitable toll on exhausted gig workers. It’s a clever switch, and if I’m being a bit vague it’s because I really don’t want to spoil it, but I was impressed at how neatly it works, confronting us with the fact that the grind of capitalism doesn’t need villains to produce victims.

Also worth noting is the novel’s preamble, which announces that despite the author’s past literary pretensions there will be no embellishment, no artifice or metaphor, just straight reportage—a bit of irony that sets up the novel by insisting it’s not going to be exactly what it is. It’s a joke, clearly, but not nearly as good as the story that comes next.

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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 Coming of the Tree] (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. Living Things is published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and by Coach House Books in the USA.

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, and Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, longlisted for the same prize in 2024. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.

Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer. He has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and he writes a newsletter, Adam’s Notes, on substack. He lives in northern Alberta.