About this Event
The Short and Satisfying Book Club, led by Georgia Court, is for those looking for a shorter read that is ripe for discussion. March's selection is On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated from French by Jordan Stump. A marvelous debut, this tender and painful portrait of French working-class life finds shards of poetry inside the twin hardships of poverty and service work.
We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $13.95, which is the cost of/includes a copy of On the Clock to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
ABOUT THE BOOK
One family: two stories of unappreciated hard work. French-fry oil burns patterns on a twenty-year-old writer's wrists; her father can never scrub his fingernails clean of grease. One story spans a summer; the other, a lifetime.
Told in two rapidly alternating strands, On The Clock packs a swift saga of a working-class girls life, moving from grimy campgrounds on hard-won family holidays to a crappy seasonal job, "mired in the heart of pointlessness" but likewise hard-won. If her father jokes about being awarded a medal for his decades working at the same factory, he is proud of it too. Claire Baglins's wry and crisply powerful depiction of their lives—at once affectionate and alienated—is particularly compelling. As Publishers Weekly notes, it is "a concise and arresting debut. In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints of portrait of her family's struggles with poverty. The simplicity of the prose only enhances the harrowing story. Readers will be stirred."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Baglin was born in 1998 in Normandy, where her father labored in a factory and her mother was a social worker. On the Clock is her first book.
A professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jordan Stump has won the ALTA National Translation Award for Prose and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
USD 16.73
