THERE’S A LITTLE EVERYDAY MAGIC IN THIS FRENCH FABLE OF COMMUTING

Abestseller in France, where it was first published last year, The Reader on the 6.27 has now been picked up by “one of France’s biggest movie producers” and it isn’t hard to imagine it being turned into something similar in look and feel to Jean-pierre Jeunet’s 2001 hit Amélie. Indeed, in a recent interview the book’s author, Jean-paul Didierlaurent, said “lots of people have told me that the novel reminds them of the films of Jeunet” – something he considers “un sacré compliment”.

We’ll have

to

wait

and

20 JUNE 2015

see

what happens, but it is to be hoped that whoever eventually ends up directing the movie version is able to capture the understated charm of the original; because, while the book cleverly manages to avoid tipping over into oversentimentality while wandering dangerously close to the line at times, it wouldn’t take much to transform it into an almighty Gallic cheese-fest on the big screen.

The unlikely hero of the piece is Guylain Vignolles – a worker at a paper pulping plant who spends his days feeding unwanted books into the gaping maw of a machine called THE READER ON THE 6.27 JEAN-PAUL DIDIERLAURENT Mantle, 195pp, £12.99 the Zerstor 500. This beast – and Didierlaurent gives it a wonderful, malign life of its own as “The Thing” – then slices, soaks and pummels the books into a grey mush which is finally “expelled in the form of great steaming turds”. The resulting substance, the narrator observes, “would be used one day to make other books, some of which would inevitably end up back here… The Thing was an absurdity that greedily ate its own shit.”

Out of context, that might sound like an attempt to pass comment on the futility of writing and publishing books, but in fact Didierlaurant is on his way to making the opposite point: his central thesis is that every printed page, however humble in origin, is a little bit sacred.

Vignolles is so embarrassed by his name (reversing the first letters makes it sound like “Vilain Guignol,” or “ugly puppet”) that he spends most of his life trying to remain invisible – with one very notable exception. Every day, while cleaning out the belly of the machine, he manages to rescue a few precious, un-pulped pages, which he then reads aloud on the train to work the next morning, regardless of the subject matter – a performance that is lapped up by the bored commuters around him.

One day he finds a memory stick on the train, downloads the contents and discovers the diary of somebody called Julie, a toilet attendant in a shopping mall. He enjoys her writing so much (and so, I suspect, will you) that he starts to perform extracts to the commuters on the 6.27 and