Driver

“Using his vivid imagination, his artist’s attention to detail, and his nearly 20 years of experience driving passenger and freight trains throughout France, Mattia Filice transmutes labor into literature…The novel’s seemingly random rhythms—the placement of line breaks, the way stories may develop over many pages or break off suddenly—replicate the way the ‘mandated time’ of the job prevents one from living or thinking at a natural tempo.” — Eric Vanderwall, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Driver smacks of real life on the tracks, with the tang of scorched electrics. We hear about the life of a railwayman from novice to fully qualified mécanicien, taking services out by himself. The narrator is never without his driver’s bag, containing handbook, pliers, starter key: part essential kit, part unshirkable burden . . . Driver is a welcome addition to our strangely threadbare library of readable books about work.” —Stephen Smith, Financial Times
“Filice’s rhythmic and searching novel… amounts to a distinctive rendering of a young man’s effort to make meaning from his life.” — Publishers Weekly

“The novel is a remarkable achievement of tone, acknowledging the crap aspects of the work…as well as its nobility…The terseness of the language and its irregular rhythms convey both a monotony and a relentless hurry – the need always to be somewhere else, and not a second late. In the nuanced world of Filice’s book, work is often resented but can also satisfy. And, at times… it can bring pure joy.” —Chris Power, The Observer

“Mattia Filice’s book reveals a style–the style of a writer unlike any other. He takes you on a spirited ride into the universe of rails, leaving one with an indelible vision of the contemporary condition of the working class.” —La tribune de Genève

“Mattia Filice transforms his experience as a train driver into a huge epic fresco. Driver is a totally unexpected first novel.” —Les Inrockuptibles