Everyday Mathilde takes the Metro, then the
commuter train to the office of a large multi-national
where she works in the marketing department. Every day,
the same routine, the same trains. But something
happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different
opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she
finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to
do.
Thibault is a paramedic. Every day he drives to
the addresses he receives from his controller. The city
spares him no grief: traffic jams, elusive parking
spaces, delivery trucks blocking his route. He is well
aware that he may be the only human being many of the
people he visits will see for the entire day and is well
acquainted with the symptomatic illnesses, the major
disasters, the hustle and bustle and, of course, the
immense, pervading loneliness of the city.
Before one day in May, Mathilde and Thibault
had never met. They were just two anonymous figures in a
crowd, pushed and shoved and pressured continuously by
the loveless, urban world.
Underground Time is
a novel of quiet violence - the violence of
office-bullying, the violence of the brutality of the
city - in which our two characters move towards an
inevitable meeting.
‘Two solitary existences cross paths in this
poignant chronicle, a new testimony to de Vigan's superb
eloquence' Lire