At 24, the Frenchwoman Claire Baglin has just published Indoors, a striking first novel that ended up on the literary prize list of the World, notably. We joined her in France to discuss it.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
The novel begins with this striking scene: returning from vacation, the little family stops at the restaurant; the narrator and her brother rush towards the luminous logo, reassuring, we can already imagine them salivating, hysterical in front of the smell of frying which symbolizes for them the party, “parental capitulation”. An exceptional stop, as we will discover later, since “it’s not given”, said his father.
Ellipse. Years later, the narrator passes her job interview to work in this same fast food chain, the only one she knows.
“It was first the memory that interested me,” explains Claire Baglin on the phone. “Genres of childhood impressions”, transposed by fragments. “Then I had a fast-food experience several times and it kind of interfered with the writing process,” she adds.
Throughout the novel, we jump from these fragments of childhood to the present of this job in fast food. The passages are short, the effect is powerful. So even if Indoors is no more than 160 pages, we are drawn into a dizzying whirlwind between two worlds of submission – childhood and precarious work, where each employee “plays his place” daily to find himself in the most coveted positions in the restaurant.
“There is the hiring, the first day, the training and then the games between colleagues, the evolutions, the different positions, the positions where you do not want to go and the positions where you want to go. …”, she illustrates to show a pattern that could correspond to a large number of employment situations.
Then there are those hands that are damaged in contact with disinfectants. The incessant requests from a manager named Chouchou. The trips to the dump as a child, where his father picked up all sorts of abandoned electrical appliances that he got it into his head to repair. The family apartment where there was constant disorder due to the clutter of recovered and accumulated objects.
Tell without denouncing
Although she skilfully manages to create a suffocating atmosphere where one ends up having the impression of running out of air, Claire Baglin insists on the fact that this book is not a form of denunciation. Neither from his childhood nor from this type of job.
“I worked at the fast food restaurant of my own free will. It was a choice that was motivated of course by money, as is the case for most students who work there, but I got out of it, ”she says.
Besides, I didn’t want to write a novel that would speak, for example, of social trajectory or even transclass. It was not my intention at all.
Claire Baglin
In fact, in addition to being a way to support himself financially, this job allowed him to understand the work at his father’s factory, whose variable working hours shaped his childhood – silences imposed when he slept during the day to work at night when he returned in the early morning, of which there are some fleeting images in the novel.
Like the crowded apartment of her childhood, “fast food is an environment that seems a bit absurd,” she says. “It is perhaps the link with the child who must learn words, must understand situations with the keys given to him. It’s also all that, in fact, this side where we find ourselves quite lost. And there is a time when the child must acquire knowledge that is very curious, sometimes. »
And behind all these absurd situations, there is the little girl and then the young adult who observes in silence and writes.
When asked if she wants to continue writing, Claire Baglin nods. But after a moment of hesitation, she quotes Roland Barthes as an answer: “Writing needs hiding. »
Indoors
Claire Baglin
Midnight Editions
160 pages