“In the dining room”, by Claire Baglin: kingdom of the burger
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“In theaters”, by Claire Baglin, Minuit, 160 p., €16, digital €12.
As a child, she played the merchant. Opened and closed with pride the drawer of the cash register that had been offered to him. She refused to give credit to her little brother if he did not have enough counterfeit notes to pay for his fictitious consumption. “You drank the granita so you payshe told him, Otherwise I call the police. » The summer of her 20th birthday, the narrator ofIndoors works in a fast food restaurant. And it’s not a game anymore.
In this remarkably well-mastered first novel, Claire Baglin, born in 1998, describes the repetitive and alienating nature of tasks performed with no other goal than to ensure work productivity. She paints these kitchens where “nobody cooks” but where we “handles production equipment”. The gestures there “are the same as those of the team members of twenty years ago”. She does it without apparent anger, but with a slight ironic distance, which would be enough to raise her evocation of the cooking of fries to the rank of an anthology scene.
Social trajectory
But the richness of the text is also due to the comparison of the narrator’s childhood memories with the daily life she experiences in this fast food chain. In her way of creating discreet echoes between the concerns and lifestyles of a family with modest incomes, for whom an outing to fast food was a celebration, and the perception she has of working in the realm of the burger. So we never really know if the young woman rereads her childhood in the light of her drying summer job, or if she deciphers the world of work in the light of her own social trajectory. This ambivalence of the novel allows the story to escape any assertive temptation: the reader will draw his own conclusions, since the narrator is careful not to state any thesis whatsoever.
The only thing she is certain of is that all things considered, of the various jobs she may be assigned to each day, cooking is the lesser evil. “I only fear the room and the void it creates in meshe says. At the fries, the automatism prevents me from thinking. » Because under the apparent assurance that his detached tone gives him, and behind the illusion of mastery produced by the novelistic device, we can hear a concern, a tremor, which we sense that they feed the desire to write. Saying the emotional, relational and intellectual poverty that dismays her when she works in a fast food restaurant, isn’t this, for Claire Baglin, questioning the value of the world in which she grew up?
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