O que é Meu | What is Mine

-Editora Fósforo, 2023-

-APCA Award 2023 (Best Essay)-

Press Release (Fitzcarraldo Press):

In What Is Mine, sociologist José Henrique Bortoluci uses interviews with his father, Didi, to retrace the recent history of Brazil and of his family. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s, Didi’s work as a truck driver took him away from home for long stretches at a time as he crisscrossed the country and participated in huge infrastructure projects such as the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a scheme spearheaded by the military dictatorship of the time and undertaken thanks to brutal deforestation. An observer of history, Didi also recounts the toll his work has taken on his health, from a heart attack in middle age to the cancer that defines his retirement, the diagnosis of which opens the book. Weaving the history of a nation with that of a man, Bortoluci explores the similarities between cancer and capitalism – both problems of expansion, both embodiments of ‘the gospel of growth at all costs’ – and traces the distance that class has placed between himself and his father. Inspired and influenced by authors such Annie Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich and Ocean Vuong, What Is Mine is a moving, thought-provoking and brilliantly constructed examination of the scars we carry with us, as people and as countries

  • Fósforo (Brasil) - March 2023

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blurbs and kudos

  • The pragmatic discourse of the father is opposed to that of the son, a left-wing intellectual. But Didi's love and irony allow Bortoluci to bring two worlds together in a tender and intelligent story.

    Le Monde

  • A luminous social history of Brazil, told from the loving perspective of an academic son confronting the illness of his working-class father.

    João Moreira Salles, film-maker and writer

  • "What Is Mine" is an unforgettable oral history of truck driving along the potholed roads carving up the Amazon rainforest: bandits, sleep deprivation, beef barbecued on the engine. It is also an incisive political critique of ecocidal ideas of “progress”, a powerful reflection on the ways labour shapes a human body, and a loving exploration of a relationship between a father and son. It already has the feel of a classic.

    Caleb Klaces, author of Fatherhood

  • [Bortoluci] recounts how the human drive to tame nature can be expressed through pathways, catalogues, or roads marked in a forest. He tells how—echoing Annie Ernaux’s “The Place” in many ways—, despite studies taking one far from their origins and the habits of the body making it impossible to return, one can do so with words. Absolutely beautiful.

    Chiara Valerio, author of Chi Dice e chi Tace

  • Powerful in its atomization of the Brazilian style of “capitalist devastation” that goes by the name of progress, movingly tender in its evocation of an Odysseus of a father, a long-distance trucker who plays a part in the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, this is a memoir like no other. I read it in one great gulp, unable to put it down. Brilliant!

    Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness

  • If it were up to me to suggest one book, just one, to a foreigner curious about Brazil, I would recommend this one, and I would also recommend it to us, Brazilians, laymen, teachers, researchers, neophytes or doctors. For some, to discover, for the others, to rediscover our country.

    Luiz Eduardo Soares, social sientist and writer

  • A son’s journey, around father and country, subtle and complex, tender and brutal; an intimate work of rare beauty and power.

    Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

  • A political document told as memoir, this is a book of incredible beauty and insight, one which demonstrates one of the greatest truths: that our lives, and the lives of our families, are inextricably bound to the structures of class, economics, and history they were born into.

    Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea