Because he wants to seize the day, Bernard Busard, a 22-yeal-old young man, challenges himself constantly: bicycle racing, winning a young woman, testing his strength against a machine. For six months, this toy-factory worker in a mountainous region known for its toymaking decides to produce nothing but plastic hearse-carriages. The mechanical injection press that he is struggling with should allow him to buy first his freedom (a coffee-shop by the highway) then love (Marie-Jeanne Lemercier, an overly scrubbed laundry woman). He absolutely has to have these 325,000 Francs that will make something of him... But will he be strong enough to get to the end of the mechanism whose obsessive cadence beats the rhythm of his days and nights?

Written during Roger Vailland’s Communist period, 325,000 Francs, published by Buchet-Chastel in 1955, is a novel about the world of the working-class, by a writer at the height of his powers. Full of life, as dry and quick as a Hemingway story, 325,000 Francs is truly imposing — thanks to its stunning mastery and restraint.