The Knight of the Railways

Eric Vanderwall takes a ride with French author Mattia Filice’s debut novel “Driver,” newly translated by Jacques Houis.

By Eric VanderwallOctober 20, 2025

• Fiction

SEATED ALONE in a cabin at the head of a train that stretches for nearly a kilometer, one learns to see the beauty and poetry in the mundanities of driving such a vehicle. The overhead cable becomes, as one driver puts it,

a one-stringed musical instrument and the train is its bow. Its timbre spreads and pierces the air when, under the ribbing drawn by the taut wires, the traction unit and its cars appear; a cavalcade of sounds invades the territory, wheels on the rails, the panto on copper, air expelled by the compressor, friction and axles, motors and bogies.

Using his vivid imagination, his artist’s attention to detail, and his nearly 20 years of experience driving passenger and freight trains throughout France, Mattia Filice transmutes labor into literature in his hybrid prose/poetry debut novel Driver, first published in France in 2023 and now available from NYRB Press in an English translation by Jacques Houis.

Driver begins with the narrator interviewing and testing to enter training to become a capital-D “Driver,” in a section titled “The Apprenticeship of the Knight with Neither Armor nor Sword nor Horse” (making the knight in question even more ill-equipped than Don Quixote). Management impresses on the aspirant Driver the importance of “being a Ouinner / a blessed budding yes-man,” while assessing his potential with tests like “old video games / with primitive graphics / a little train to reconstruct with the mouse / a sliding ball you have to replace before it falls / take the shortest route / A matter of clicks.”

When fellow Driver-in-training Ach (“the perfect prototype of the shark who slips / through the net”) oversleeps and arrives late to a training session at which the “Company’s number 2 is in attendance,” only the 2004 Madrid train bombings occurring the same day diverts attention from his tardiness to graver matters (one of the few current events establishing the time period of the novel’s setting). Soon the trainees have their graduation “in a small crowded room” that resembles “an old storage room / a sad rat’s nest.” As Drivers, they will be “invested with both power and submission”—power over the movement of the train (and hence over life and death) but also submission to “the Company” (though, this being France, strikes happen often, the narrator later taking part in one).

After the narrator enters the ranks of Drivers, the chronological continuity of the training period fades. The novel’s latter two sections, “The Lyricism of the Knight Transported All the Way to the Stop Block” and “The Knight Posted at the Good Crossing,” consider the life of the Driver impressionistically, through “fragments of stories” in which encounters are fleeting and “discussions are amputated.” Drivers spend hours alone in their respective cabs, with commuters jammed into the cars behind them, seeing each other only briefly in break rooms strung along the lines of track—rooms where “there are millions of conversations beginning, sentences / beginning, ideas beginning, stories beginning / nothing finished.”

That fragmentation—captured in the text by free verse with minimal punctuation, and occasional forays into more standard prose—aptly sums up the experience of a contemporary life dominated by work. Thoughts are as scattered and fleeting as the countless tasks one must perform. As soon as a matter has been addressed to the Company’s satisfaction, one has to move on, and so too with one’s interior life. The novel’s seemingly random rhythms—the placement of line breaks, the way stories may develop over many pages or break off suddenly—replicate the way the “mandated time” of the job prevents one from living or thinking at a natural tempo.

The Driver’s comrades in arms gradually emerge as increasingly defined characters through the accretion of such fragments. There is Gérard, the narrator’s kindly mentor with an “instinctive mustache,” who “knows all the shapes of the Earth.” There is Geoffroy, the “black cat,” the perennially unlucky Driver who always manages to break down, to encounter the worst difficulties, and, in the view of his colleagues, to thereby absorb all the misfortune that would otherwise come to them. There is Kamal, the Lothario of the railway, with a woman at every stop (and frequently accompanying him in the cab), a Driver whose “train breathes sex, smells like sex, sweats sex,” a Driver whose “dick has entered the public domain.” There is Gaël with his “face that would make Aphrodite tremble.”

And then there’s management, the upper ranks of the Company where, like management just about everywhere, “competence is not one of the criteria.” There is the Trainer, “a regulation machine” who has the Company’s “reference book [as] his bedside reading.” When the narrator comes up for assessment, first testing to become a Driver and regularly thereafter to recertify, he drives under the gimlet eye of “the Man who whispers fear into [his] ears,” a man “wrapped in skin stretched to the limit / stuck to his bones like the T-1000.” And at the top of the Company’s managerial heap sits the Director, so unreachable for the regular Drivers as to become a “figure out of workers’ mythology”—until they meet him during the strike negotiations.

With work as consuming as the narrator’s, colleagues and management constitute much of his social world. His “Nonna Calabrese” and “Breton Granny” feature frequently in his thoughts, though never in the action that transpires in cabs, stations, uncomfortable sleepaways, and break rooms. These women are, for the narrator, semiabstract beings to be silently called upon in times of need. (And Nonna’s sayings, as well as the narrator’s imagined conversations with her, remain in Italian, untranslated, a nice touch.) When Granny dies, the narrator receives the news in a text message, and his first concern is to get the rest of his shift covered. Work and life being what they are, the immediate needs of the job soon subsume the significance of a personal loss. The narrator never describes attending Granny’s funeral, or any other family function for that matter, nor does he seem to have a wife or girlfriend, or any friends outside the Company. This isolation of the individual in a world almost completely ruled by work aptly captures what life is like for many people, Drivers or not.

Many professions inspire outsider curiosity, and Drivers often meet with their own “famous question”: “Have you ever killed anyone?” There are suicides by train, of course, but also a little child who runs to his mother on another platform and never makes it, and Nourredine, a fellow Driver who, when walking back to the station after parking his train, “confuses the service tracks with the main track / And on the main track / behind his back / a train / arrives / full speed.” Other deaths occur on the job, such as when heavy cable insulation punches through the cab window and kills a man at the controls. The Company makes a vague announcement (something like the French corporate version of thoughts and prayers), “then / nothing” and “weeks months and years go by / on the rail / emotions die down […] one tragedy erases the last one.” Such occupational hazards become part of the monotony as each “workday drags behind it the hundreds, the thousands of equivalent days that came before it, all hitched together.”

Throughout the novel, the narrator conceives of his work as a Driver not just literally but also literarily. Often, as the section titles suggest, this is in Arthurian terms, with the narrator wondering if “Percival [would] have been all right with filling out a form and checking the boxes when he went in quest of the Grail,” or imagining the end of his shift as the end of a battle when he “goes off to set his armor / on the bench of the lounge at the end of the platform,” or recasting employees on strike as knights in “revolt against the lord” (a “soporific speaker” who “fights his battles in the conference room”). Why the narrator chooses to envision his working life in chivalric terms never becomes clear, though perhaps this incompletely developed, self-conscious allegorizing arises more from his literary mind grasping at anything available to make work more endurable. Widely conversant in French literature, the narrator offers up passing allusions to Alexandre Dumas, André Breton, and Pierre Corneille, and frequent quotations from Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire, not to mention references to a wide range of cultural forms, both high and low (from Wagner, John Coltrane, and Dante to Depeche Mode and Terminator 2: Judgment Day). This erudition provides points of comparison and a means for understanding his life as a Driver.

Fittingly for a chronicle of working life, the novel leaves off—after “14,328 trains 232,254 platform stops 481,346 kilometers 795,282,436 ties”—without any sense of closure or finality. Like the trains themselves, which ran before us and will run after us, there are many stops but no end point. The life of a Driver—like the life of any workingman—is “a merciless war / where what’s at stake is filling your fridge and having a roof over / your head.” In such a struggle, one can do only as the narrator does in the final lines: ask for a better shift and tell a colleague “Thank you and / Hang in there.”