ON THE CLOCK by Claire Baglin
Translated by Jordan Stump
Like pretty much everyone else on Earth, I’ve been binging the crap out of - and being thoroughly shaken by - Severance. Yet, scary as the spec fic trappings may be, the real horror for me lies in its darkly satirical treatment of the daily grind. Particularly the mind-numbing, seemingly pointless drudgery of menial drone work. It’s a contemporary Communist Manifesto with the added postscript of revolution.
The buzz around Claire Baglin’s loosely autobiographical debut, On The Clock, frequently references Severance and, while I get the appeal to PR wonks, it completely wrong footed me. Told in a series of vignettes that alternate between the perspective of a young woman starting out at a fast food chain and the everyday life of a working class family, it had me waiting for some surreal left turn that never came. Instead, On the Clock is a quiet, tender but unsparing tale that owes more to Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck or Anzia Yezierska than Hollywood.
A remarkable book about the seemingly unremarkable, filled with moments of light and grace, On the Clock is held back only by a certain sloggishness in its execution. Though I suspect that’s the point.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin (Tr. Jordan Stump)
Daunt Books, 2025
159 pages