What is mine It is a book of essays at the same time as it is a memoir, at the same time as it is practically a diary – but, above all, it is a privilege. It’s just that the simple is rarely counted as the beautiful.
“In my father’s imagination, a trip from Earth to the Moon by truck is something more concrete than my life as an academic, teacher, writer”, begins by explaining the author, José Henrique Bortoluci (doctorate in Sociology from the University of Michigan and, since 2015, professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, in São Paulo).
With this statement he does not want, as it may seem to a more inattentive look, to discredit his father – on the contrary, he wants to start by talking about the greatness of Seu Didi who spent 50 years (between 1965 and 2015) traveling the roads of Brazil, thus becoming a privileged witness to History.
In 50 years, Seu Didi saw, from the front row, the military dictatorship, the hard days of those who had no money, the arrival of “progress” and the destruction of the Amazon forest. What he didn’t see – life at home, the cogwheels of daily life, the passionate wife who wrote to him, the children who both wanted him to come home and wanted him to leave quickly so they could return to normality and the illness itself coming (the book was written while Seu Didi was undergoing treatment for cancer that was fatal to him) – it is explained in this book that, apart from being a piece of literature, it is also the result of a tender meeting between father and son.“We can only speak our own language when we settle accounts with the language of our parents”, José Henrique Bortoluci tells us, to explain how the dialogue with the father would be carried out above all with active listening. The author also explains to us, right in the first pages, that the decision to start writing this book was prior to the discovery of his father’s illness – but that, naturally, the diagnosis had triggered an emergency. And then the pandemic arrived.“Issues of method and style, which took up a lot of my time at the beginning of this project, became theoretical issues after the medical diagnosis, in December 2020”, he writes, and then explains that the book that readers now have in their hands began to be developed between hospitalizations, consultations, baths, trips and decisions about treatments.Six long interviews, recorded between January and February 2021, would later be the draft of this important Brazilian family album.
The cover of the novel “O que é meu”, by José Henrique Bortoluci
What is mine
José Henrique Bortoluci
Company of Letters
€17.45
