Highbrow/Low Commitment Book Club: On the Clock by Claire Baglin

A bimonthly book club for the busy literature lovers featuring titles around 200 pages or less. 

In August we are reading On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (99 pages). A tender and painful portrait of French working-class life that finds shards of poetry inside the twin hardships of poverty and service work.

Told in two rapidly alternating strands, On The Clock packs a swift saga of a working-class girls'f life, moving from grimy campgrounds on hard-won family holidays to a crappy seasonal job, "mired in the heart of pointlessness" but likewise hard-won. If her father jokes about being awarded a medal for his decades working at the same factory, he is proud of it too. Claire Baglins's wry and crisply powerful depiction of their lives—at once affectionate and alienated—is particularly compelling. As Publishers Weekly notes, it is "a concise and arresting debut. In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints of portrait of her family's struggles with poverty."