Those of us who speak English as a first language will probably never truly know how fortunate we are to have what feels like the whole world of literature available to us in our language. We could read from morning to night, one end of the week to the other (and contrary to popular belief, I do actually go to work sometimes) and still not even scratch the surface of the English-language oeuvre. So reading books which have been translated from another language is something that as a reader you more or less have to seek out. Today’s book, though, was a serendipitous find for me a couple of years ago, as I browsed the bookshop shelves looking for something new. Published in French in 2014 as Le Liseur du 6h 27, it was then released in English translation in 2015 under the title The Reader On The 6.27.

The book’s premise is that each day, a solitary man gets on the 6.27 train and begins to read out loud from loose pages of random books - fiction novels, textbooks, recipe books or history, there is no genre the morning reader does not share. Guylain works at a book-pulping factory - each day he sees piles of remaindered or unwanted books fed into the insatiable machine which will return the books to mush. Each day he rescues whichever pages he can from the machine; these are the pages he reads from to his fellow commuters each morning.

Other characters include the security guard, Yvon who memorises and recites alexandrines - lines of French verse in iambic hexameter - and Giuseppe, a veteran of the factory who has sacrificed his legs and many years of his life to the plant. The Thing also looms large throughout the novel - the pulping machine which anthropomorphically menaces the factory workers by its very presence.

“May the shredder live long, after you are gone hence”

The factory is a strange microcosm of society, with its own precise rules and hierarchy. Promotion and progression depends on favours granted and bestowed. Each day Guylain must climb down into the bowels of the pulping machine to fully clean out the workings: this is when he rescues the loose pages which will become the following day’s material for the train audience. Each evening he returns home to his apartment and talks to his flatmate, the goldfish. His quest to track down all copies of a particular edition of an unusual book occupies the rest of his free time.

Guylain’s morning recitations bring him to the attention of some travellers who wish to hear more of him - and he soon finds himself reading pages of light erotica to a roomful of particularly attentive geriatric listeners.

“Once a year, at the spring equinox, I do a recount”

The pace of the story changes when Guylain finds a USB stick on the train one day, containing diary entries written by a mysterious woman. He becomes obsessed with her, finding her perspective on life enchanting and distracting him from his fears of The Thing and his ever-increasing productivity targets. As he searches for her in the most unlikely of locations, we can only follow behind and hope that what he finds measures up to his dreams.

The Reader On The 6.27 is ever so French. It mixes desolation, ennui, and Gallic shrugs with sprinklings of pure magic. It’s a quick read, and it scratches an itch you’ll not realise you had. If you’re looking for something a little bit different, you can’t go far wrong with this.

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