Factory you shall never have my soul
I am here
And I count for so much more than you
And I count so much more because of you
Thanks to you
Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp
agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants
and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite
precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the
weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting
rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously
lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle
carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces
created by his insistent return to a new line of text - mirroring his
continued return to the production line - we discover the woman he
loves, the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the smell of the sea.
In this celebrated French bestseller, translated by Stephanie Smee,
Ponthus captures the mundane, the beautiful and the strange, writing
with an elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast with the blood
and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line is a poet's ode to manual
labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable.
