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Élisabeth Filhol

Author of La Centrale

3 Works 79 Members 5 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the names: Elisabeth Filhol, Elisabeth Filhol

Works by Élisabeth Filhol

La Centrale (2010) 54 copies
Doggerland (2019) 19 copies
Bois II (2014) 6 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Filhol, Élisabeth
Birthdate
1965-05-01
Gender
female
Nationality
France
Country (for map)
France
Birthplace
Mende, France

Members

Reviews

La centrale is a morose look at the life of a worker regularly switching jobs between several French nuclear power plants. The main character is a maintenance worker for nuclear plants, and his job consists of cleansing high-radiation areas during downtimes. He and others like him go in a few minutes at a time, quickly cleanse a small area, and then rush out again to avoid absorbing more than the annually permitted radiation dose of twenty millisieverts. One day, he picks up a loose screw that washed down from deep into the reactor, and he’s out of a job for the next twelve months, until his counter of permissible millisieverts starts afresh.

This is a hard one to review. Not much is going on in the way of plot: Filhol is more interested in delving into the piecemeal ruminations of a perennial temp worker constantly worried about employment, radiation, accommodation, companionship, dying. On other levels, too, the book abounds in snippets and fragments that slowly coagulate into a coherent narrative. Filhol sketches little interactions between the caste of the itinerant workers, pens little essays about things like Chernobyl, and inserts traditionally narrative sequences, such as the one about the anti-nuclear activists. Much of the plot, such as it is, plays out in temporary accommodation, brief sojourns, short-term jobs, interrupted colleague-friend relationships, and segments of the road trips between power plants. After a while, this creates a vague discomfort that is a wonderful companion to the subject matter.

In the end I’m glad the bookseller recommended this to me: this is a book I would never have considered buying myself, and so it pushed me past my comfort zone. Did I enjoy it? Not initially, and certainly not as a narrative, at least. But as the pages wore on I found myself appreciating the style, the morose ebb and flow of a nearly burnt-out temp worker in a harsh business I did not know about. Towards the end I almost couldn’t put it down.
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Petroglyph | 3 other reviews | Jun 8, 2014 |

Awards

Statistics

Works
3
Members
79
Popularity
#226,897
Rating
½ 3.4
Reviews
5
ISBNs
15
Languages
5

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