★★★★★ Baglin’s canvas is compactly controlled; her tightly cut scenes have a cinematic specificity. There’s barely a hint of exposition, yet she’s able to condense the humiliations of a lifetime into a few spare lines. It’s one of the paciest and most gripping pieces of prose I’ve encountered in a while—and a lesson to us all.
— Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph
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
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'f 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."
★★★★★ Baglin’s canvas is compactly controlled; her tightly cut scenes have a cinematic specificity. There’s barely a hint of exposition, yet she’s able to condense the humiliations of a lifetime into a few spare lines. It’s one of the paciest and most gripping pieces of prose I’ve encountered in a while—and a lesson to us all.
— Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph
A striking and necessary novel, precise and luminously simple.
— Les inrockuptibles
A concise and arresting debut. In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints a portrait of her family’s struggles with poverty. The simplicity of the prose only enhances the harrowing story. Readers will be stirred.
— Publishers Weekly
I am impressed by the tension that emanates from the text, the entanglement both dark and luminous of the two childhood stories and the present in this soulless daily work, which becomes terrifying when viewed from the inside. Despite everything, writing allows us to bring out bursts of humanity where we least expect them, starting with the muffled resistance of the narrative voice.
— Elisa Shua Dusapin
This debut novel, translated from the original French by Jordan Stump, playfully explores social inequity through the lens of one family’s relationship to work. The narrator, a 20-year-old in search of a summer gig, is hired for a fast-food position after a particularly grueling interview. She alternates recounting the minutiae of the job — “frozen rectangle” fires, boiling oil, repetition — and memories featuring her electrician father, a graceless and unfortunate country man whom she both loves and is ashamed of. On the Clock is a visceral depiction of manual labor, alienation, and family in rural France.
— Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
A mesmerizing novel about the cleaning rituals at a fast food restaurant.
— Dayna Tortorici, n+1
A remarkably surefooted first novel, written without anger, but with a slight ironic distance that makes of her telling of the potato-frying process a passage worthy of inclusion in French literary anthologies.
— Le Monde
Superb and astonishing.
— Michael Magee, author of Close to Home
I raced through this extraordinary novel about ordinary life… It’s stylish and sparse and brilliant on inequality and alienation. This small book packs a big punch.
— Sara Lawrence, The Daily Mail
On theClock is no literary “junk food”... In fact, this tiny tome packs quite the wollop, providing sly social commentary though its wry account of one not unintelligent young person’s entry into the machinery of capitalism.
— Scout Magazine
On the Clock gives a new level of detail to the realities of blue-collar labor. By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore.
— Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
Baglin’s assured debut is both an inventory of the impersonal world of fast food and a personal narrative of a working-class life.... Like treated beef, Baglin’s novel is a lean, finely textured thing. In Jordan Stump’s translation from the French, the novel captures the little triumphs, stinging humiliations, and physical toll of labor
