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Driver

Driver - Paperback

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Availability:In StockContributor:Mattia Filice, Jacques Houis (Translator)Publish date:10/21/2025Pages:368
Language:EnglishPublisher:New York Review of BooksISBN-13:9781681379883ISBN-10:1681379880UPC:9781681379883Book Category:FictionBook Subcategory:World Literature, Psychological, LiteraryBook Topic:FranceSize:8.40 x 5.70 x 0.90 inchesWeight:0.9502Product ID:SC0APQ4FYY
A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action, this vibrantly written debut is narrated by a man who runs a high-speed train in France--a story born out of the author's experience as a real-life train driver.

Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails--packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond--Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.
Language:EnglishPublisher:New York Review of BooksISBN-13:9781681379883ISBN-10:1681379880UPC:9781681379883Book Category:FictionBook Subcategory:World Literature, Psychological, LiteraryBook Topic:FranceSize:8.40 x 5.70 x 0.90 inchesWeight:0.9502Product ID:SC0APQ4FYY
Mattia Filice became a train driver in 2004. Since then, he has been on the rails, stationed out of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Driver is his first novel

Jacques Houis has translated several works from French, including the first modern translation of Paul Scarron's seventeenth-century classic The Comic Romance.
Publisher: New York Review of Books

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