Living Things

Rezensionen / Stimmen

'Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a "lads on tour" caper.'

- Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement '[An] 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.... Hachemi's is the sort of writing that compulsively interrogates itself as writing, in which literary theorizing runs alongside the storytelling.... Hachemi's documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go.'

- Rob Doyle, New York Times '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 '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 'A sinister, suspenseful novel, Living Things exposes how the biotech industry will take the foundations of life and mutilate them into things untrustworthy as triffids. Hachemi wrangles form itself, making a sci-fi of what is ultimately extremely quotidian and true: Frankenstein creatures created as fodder to feed an increasingly undernourished world, and the refracted suffering that upholds such a system, in which living things - worker, plant and animal - are made consumable parts in helix. Hachemi deftly lays bare the cannibalistic bent at the heart of global capitalism.'

- Abi Andrews, author of The Word for Woman is Wilderness 'Heady, diaristic and compulsively readable in Julia Sanches's perfect translation, four reckless and stubborn college students get themselves caught in the hell of factory farming in Southern France. To say that Living Things is a superb eco-thriller is both true and yet falls short of just how magnificently unclassifiable Hachemi's novel is.'

- Jacob Rogers, The Center for Fiction 'Living Things is a short novel that changes its skin - and almost its genre - in each of its seven 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, economic and health systems ... [T]he fact that this all happened to the author affects us not only as readers, but as human beings.'

- Carlos Zanon, El Pais '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 Espana '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 naive 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 Martinez, La Vanguardia 'An endless array of sounds and ideas reverberate through these pages, at times apocalyptic and at other times deceptively naive.'

- Que Leer 'Blending together allusions to Hemingway, Borges, Bolano, 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.'

- Maria Teresa Lezcano, Diario Sur '[A] short, horrific, astonishing novel ... by turns cool and frantic, dissociated and visceral, and all the more unsettling for it. Animal cruelty becomes mundane, sandwiched between minutely rendered ... and genuinely funny accounts of negotiations over where to sleep, what to eat, the everyday stuff of life.... Living Things, superbly translated by Julia Sanches, won an English PEN Translates Award in 2023, and Hachemi was named one of the best young Spanish novelists by Granta in 2021. In this, his first novel, it is apparent why.'

- Sadie Graham, Toronto.com