Driver begins as a contemporary apprentice tale: the narrator, a young man from the provinces, comes to Paris and enrolls in a course to become a train driver. As he discovers the train and its workings, from its internal machinery to its operative head, he is transported into a world both technical and poetic, with its own laws and codes, its own specialized language, its heroes and legends, its passions and boredoms, its dangers.

Drawing from his experience of nearly two decades as a train driver, Mattia Felice constructs a propulsive narrative of meals scarfed down on the go, of solitude and sleepless nights, accidents and breakdowns, conversations with friends and solidarity with fellow workers. His train, like the ship in Moby-Dick, becomes a microcosm for life itself.

Driver is a book about work, about the romance of the rails, but also about the tedium and intensity of doing such a job day in and day out, as well as the workers’ continual struggle to improve their working conditions through strikes and protests.

The language of Driver is as eclectic and vibrant as the world the train workers inhabit: Filice’s novel blends prose with verse, and brims with technical terms, inside jokes, abbreviations, quotations, and snatches of non-French languages spoken by the train workers. Unsentimental but full of feeling, wonderfully voiced and rhythmic, Driver is a stirring ode to the power of the collective.