Excess—The Factory

American-born, French-raised writer Kaplan (Brooklyn Bridge) relates the alienation and psychic terror of factory life in this first English translation of her understated yet powerful 1982 debut. Kaplan bases the work on the factory employment she began in January 1968 as a member of the League of Young Communists. “When you arrive at a new factory, you are always very afraid,” she writes (the translators employ the depersonalized “you” form throughout). The book’s division into nine “circles” calls to mind Dante’s Inferno. Kaplan’s descriptions are simple, direct, and generalized; different factories are almost indistinguishable despite their varied output. “Parts and scraps, the factory. The places are formless, there are many corners,” Kaplan writes. Scenes of shopping only reinforce the worker’s alienation from the products of her labor: “You go in. Colors. The objects are spread out in their boxes, detached.// You pass through the aisles. You touch a little./ You see yourself in the glass, the mirrors.” Kaplan’s focus on women reflects factory segregation and gendered exploitation, though the women find ways to cope. “These are used women,” she writes, “drinking and talking under the old arcades.” Disillusioned by the crushing of 1968’s revolutionary student-worker uprising, Kaplan renders a remarkable document of her search for alternate forms of liberation from a system in which “You live, you die, each instant.” (May)