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Fiction
Writers, the Wretched of the Earth
In Munir Hachemi’s novel “Living Things,” four young men seek adventure for “literary capital” and find exploitation.
Rob Doyle is the author of “Threshold” and several other books.
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LIVING THINGS, by Munir Hachemi. Translated by Julia Sanches.
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.
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