On learning to hate chickens

In Living Things, the most horrible night in the life of its protagonist is one in which he and his friends are stuffing chickens into a cage without appropriate gear — six hundred chickens in an hour and a half. Their eyes water, their arms are being pecked bloody by tough, pointy beaks and their shoes are getting stuck in chicken shit. The protagonist of Ferymont, by contrast, doesn’t single out one most gruesome event. She simply describes her days in suffocating detail: picking strawberries in a tunnel, heat rising under its plastic roof, air so thick that opening her mouth to breathe feels like biting into warm cotton wool.

The two short novels — Lorena Simmel’s Ferymont (published in German in 2024) and Munir Hachemi’s Living Things (originally published in Spanish as Cosas Vivas in 2018, translated into English in 2024 by Julia Sanches) — are two versions of a similar story. In each, a middle-class writer signs up for a summer agricultural job — harvesting crops, handling chickens — one in Switzerland, the other in France. Simmel’s narrator is unnamed, Hachemi’s is called Munir, like himself. They come to this work as observing outsiders, questioning how the sometimes unbearably horrible things they see relate to themselves: the sort of people who usually don’t do the work, but only consume the labor’s fruits.

Both protagonists exist in a strange, constructed ecosystem of hierarchical employment: the subcontractor agency, supervisors or overseers on the farms, the farmers themselves, and — at the bottom of the line — workers. Both witness the exploitation inherent in factory farming. In both novels, workers die. Both are based on the writers’ real experiences: Hachemi and Simmel each spent time working a seasonal agricultural job. But their very different approaches and literary scopes lead them to finding starkly different answers to the question of what should be at the center of their own fictionalization of reality.