“On my way to work…”: The body and manual work in Panaderos, in the context of recent Chilean narrative

Abstract

In Chile, “set the body to work” is a popular expression that highlights the materiality of the effort invested in any economic activity. It is also a metaphor that leads us to reflect on the “absence of body” in recent narrative since accounts that articulate narrators’ voices and experiences of physical or manual trade are scarce. This article addresses an exception, the novel Panaderos (Bakers), by Nicolás Meneses (2018), that presents the everyday life of a working family in detail: the mother (a seasonal agricultural worker), the father (a baker), and the foray of the family’s eldest son, the narrator, in a supermarket’s bakery. Their lives revolve around activities that require manual skills and specialized training. On one end, their trade connects them to risk and physical accidents. On the other, they are under entrepreneurial logics devoid of empathy or justice, a system condemned by the recent Chilean social uprising.