Underground Time
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE GONCOURT PRIZE
Translated from the French by George Miller
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'One of those books that grabs you and demands to be read' - Clare Morrall
'Delphine de Vigan is a sensation' - Observer
'Sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable' - Guardian
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Every day Mathilde takes the Metro, then the commuter train to the office of a large multi-national where she works in the marketing department. Every day, the same routine, the same trains. But something happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to do.
Thibault is a paramedic. Every day he drives to the addresses he receives from his controller. The city spares him no grief: traffic jams, elusive parking spaces, delivery trucks blocking his route. He is well aware that he may be the only human being many of the people he visits will see for the entire day and is well acquainted with the symptomatic illnesses, the major disasters, the hustle and bustle and, of course, the immense, pervading loneliness of the city.
Before one day in May, Mathilde and Thibault had never met. They were just two anonymous figures in a crowd, pushed and shoved and pressured continuously by the loveless, urban world.
Underground Time is a novel of quiet violence - the violence of office-bullying, the violence of the brutality of the city - in which our two characters move towards an inevitable meeting.
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'Two solitary existences cross paths in this poignant chronicle, a new testimony to de Vigan's superb eloquence' - Lire
'What's most startling about this novel is how de Vigan makes the mundane come alive. She's an expert in detail, charging even the most ordinary situation with emotion, which makes for a massively affecting read' - Psychologies Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Vigan (No and Me) pursues two doomed characters in their Parisian isolation with her second novel, but treats them with more coldness than empathy. When a clairvoyant predicts that her life will change "on the twentieth of May," Mathilde, once her boss's right-hand woman, is steadily relieved of her responsibilities and ostracized at work after having what she thought was a polite disagreement in a business meeting. While Mathilde desperately hopes for an explanation for this banishment, she stubbornly clings to the job that supports her and her three children. Meanwhile, young EMT Thibault contemplates the emptiness of his life as he drives his emergency medical rounds. Thibault separated from his latest girlfriend because he felt no connection to her and left a thriving country practice (losing his dream of becoming a surgeon), but now questions why he wanted to come to Paris in the first place. De Vigan moves these two lost souls around their m tro, boulot, dodo days, from arrondissements to numbing office corridors, as they lose themselves further and further in moody self-reflection, a tenor that de Vigan holds but doesn't escalate, until a vague conclusion confirms that her characters are more philosophical construct than flesh and blood.
