Munir Hachemi's Living Things

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Coach House Books, 2024)

Munir Hachemi presents a story about four young men who go to France to labour in the grape harvest; his characters work hard, for little pay.

The novel’s opening chapter titles—after works by Ricardo Piglia and Edmundo Desnoes—invite readers to anticipate a multi-dimensional detective story about ordinary people in tumultuous times. (With fair warning of violence in the other chapter titles: a couple of deaths and a slaughterhouse.) Jorge Luis Borges’s and Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s chapter titles draw focus to the dance between fact and fiction. Alejo Carpentier’s and Kurt Vonnegut’s alert readers to innovative structure, and to intertextuality via Cristina Morales’ Los Combatientes, or The Fighters.

Indeed, these four young men must fight, must cultivate resilience, because their plans to work the harvest are thwarted. As supplies and resources dwindle, so do their options. The placement officer is not encouraging, having received “plenty of people from Spain, well--bon—from Spain but also Romania, Morocco, Algeria, Portugal, et cetera.” They grasp the subtext immediately, for they are the surplus: “That day we learned that we were but the et cetera of Europe.”

Thematically the novel is rich, and from a literary perspective the narrative is layered. Even so, tension thrums throughout, once the young men undertake the work that nobody chooses. Everyone cuts corners, seeking to maximize income potential in a scenario built on desperation not calculation. The story seems as uncontrollable as their reality: “From now on I won’t narrate events in the order they occurred.” Risk proliferates—under the cover of darkness, in an unmarked location.

On one hand, there is tremendous focus within the storyteller’s grasp. For instance, in the description of a dream: “I stared at my fingers and thought about all the micro-movements entailed in throwing a rock, about how you had to let go at just the right moment for it to land where you wanted it to.”

If you’re waiting for the other hand, that sense of suspension is how readers feel, too. Although Hachemi’s Living Things does chronicle a death foretold, the accumulated tension remains unresolved. And don’t expect a moral: “Yet, if this story were to have one, it would go something like this: true horror does not know vitriol, only monotony and routine.”

Ultimately, readers inhabit a state of longing, exacerbated by a suspicion that the author never valued their satisfaction. Just as the stories told by corporations and capitalists only truly serve the storytellers.

Or perhaps that is merely another story about how we tell stories: “Equally well-known is the theory that below the surface of every story lies another, purportedly deeper tale.”
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Living Things is also a story about how we rely on stories for meaning, and how storytellers can distort that meaning; it’s hard work for the etcetera of readers—and, it pays off.

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.