Guylian Vignolles has a truly terrible job - working in a book pulping plant, as the lead operator of the hideous pulping machine that daily gobbles thousands of books. His boss is a tyrannical maniac, as is his co-worker. Every day, his one fact of defiance is to rescue unpulped pages from the innards of the machine that he reads aloud on his daily commute train ride. His fellow passengers are entranced, the highlight of their day. This daily ritual, the act of reading aloud and so sharing what he has rescued gives Guylian a reason for living, a sense of purpose, and goes a tiny way toward him trying to make his life just a tiny bit bearable. One day he finds a USB stick of a diary belonging to a woman who seems to work as a cleaner of public bathrooms. Guylian is captivated by the writer of the diary, Julie, and in the process of his reading to his fellow commuters, something inside of him comes alive, and it is not long before he realises he has to track this person down. And so Guylian is set upon a path from which he cannot go back.
It's like a modern day fairy tale: an ordinary man trying to get to grips with the complicated world around him, finding and devising ways to manage what life throws at him. Truly delightful.
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