Adaptation of a multi-award-winning novel, a critical and commercial success—175,000 copies sold—, a real hard-hitting novel unlike any other.

This is the story of Ponthus, a temp hired on at a Breton fish cannery and slaughterhouse. Day after day, it inventories with infinite precision the actions of workers on the assembly line—the noise, the exhaustion, the dreams robbed by repetition of draining rituals, physical suffering. What spares Ponthus is that he’s had another life. He knows the Latin authors, he has relished Dumas, he knows Apollinaire’s poems. This is his provisional victory against all that hurts and alienates him.