Interesting perspective on how families can develop just through one generation.

A father is a lorry driver, the son uses his professional education and experience to reflect on the impact of the context in which his father lived, a solitary truck driver cabin, away from family, soothed by food and alcohol and the impact this had on his health. Interesting to listen to how the son portrays this through a highly educated professional lens, though states didn't want to present in a way his father would not understand. Appreciate the context of attachment to a familial loved one, taking time and care to reflect on their life experiences, yet feeling somewhat separate to this and different.

This book is fantastic.

Bortoluci's storytelling is immense; it truly transported me to the Brazil of the 1960s, 70s etc.

Looking at the history of this country, its economy and its people, through the eyes of someone history itself otherwise would have failed to document, allowed the perhaps sometimes dry genre of non-fiction to be explored and discussed in a nature that was embedded in such personal ties. It really made me, as the reader, care despite the topic not being one that I would have thought myself initially interested in.

If you are looking for something incredibly captivating that will move you in ways you wouldn't at first know, I cannot recommend What Is Mine enough.

Thank you so much to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for granting me this e-ARC.

This is one of those books that only Fitzcarraldo can excel at in the scope and nerve within the blend of the personal and political. Bortoluci combines interviews with his truck driver father to give a sense of the development and progress of Brazil that blends the political and real world struggles of the working class. It is both a reflection on his own upwardly mobile history and the story of those that came before him. The book reflects the author's sociology background in collecting these stories of an oft-ignored history as narrated by his father but also serve as a meditation on a son accepting that he is nearing the end of his father's life but also seeing the crossroads within his own life and the history of his country. It's eulogistic and yet hopeful for both.

beautifully written, a beautiful and realistic, honest and raw biography, near impossible to fault to any degree, a tragic but gorgeous read

Thank you NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an advanced copy of What Is Mine in exchange for an honest review.

This is a teeny tiny little memoir about Bortoluci’s father, Didi, a truck driver who spent much of his life traveling across Brazil. Didi reflects on this work and the ways in which his travels impacted his health, specifically his journey following a cancer diagnosis. I really enjoyed the writing here and found Didi’s stories both fascinating and insightful. This is the second nonfiction work that I’ve read from Fitzcarraldo Editions this year and I have been wildly impressed by both so far. I would highly recommend this one if you enjoy niche, slice of life type memoirs about normal everyday people.

What Is Mine will be published on October 14th, 2024

An intimate yet wide-ranging history of a father and son

In this slim but dense memoir, Bortoluci elides his loving and tender portrait of his father with the modern history of Brazil and its green interior. Bortoluci senior worked from the fifties onwards as a trucker, criss-crossing the enormous country with construction supplies, finished goods and raw timber as part of the nation's growth plans, and saw first hand what globalisation and national progress wrought on roadless swathes of forest, on the indigenous and in-migrating people, on the poor working class on which national pride and coastal elites depended.. Within the account, the writer also highlights his father's health issues, presenting the country of Brazil, the specific and broader grouping of working class people and his father's body as reflections of each other, his father's scars and cancer symptoms as proxies for a country always striving, forever changed.

A wonderful illumination of one working class life: four stars.

An author who is also a sociologist writes about his truck driver father’s memories during Brazil’s extreme economic, social and political change. This is wonderful idea is executed well, and we get perspectives of a son, an academic, a citizen.
I found the author’s contemplation on class differences, image-value and the body interesting.
Ideal length for a book on these themes as well.

Prose: 3 (a bit uneven for my tastes)
Ideas and themes: 5

Brilliantly told with precision and humanity. A world I never knew much about told from the people who help make it - the working class. Great detail, pacing, perspective, with clear kindness and attention paid to his father and his work.

José Henrique Bortoluci tells the story of his father as a truck driver through Brazil. But describing it as such doesn’t do it justice. The author takes the roads travelled by his father and guides us through the history of Brazil - the evils of capitalism and the neoliberal ideology that more will lead to excellence when in truth it only leads to more class inequality and environmental disaster. It was captivating to read the thoughts and life of a person whose profession we often ignore and take for granted. Growing up, my grandmother used to send me Portuguese treats every now and then, and I never questioned the life of the truck drivers that would travel long distances for these goods to reach me. The days and nights of driving with little sleep and little rest, the days away from family, and the impact of alcohol and drugs on their bodies due to the inhumane working conditions that come with such a job. José also dips into his father’s cancer diagnosis after many years of constant and depleating work, just as all his other truck driver friends die at a young age or become severely sick. Even though I read reviews criticising José for using his academic background and language as a sociologist to narrate his father’s story, I greatly enjoyed this aspect as it made the distance that class places between him and his father obvious. As a sociology student myself, and as a daughter of immigrant working class parents, I could always feel this distance growing up, so I definitely enjoyed this detail. All in all, this is an important book and I felt a great connection towards it, so I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to read it!


(Thank to Fitzcarraldo and Netgalley for this copy!)

In this title, Bortoluci uses the personal to examine the political as he entwines his father's history with that of the country of Brazil. Charting a tumultuous history as well as an uncertain present, this book is transcendant.

Though I love the idea of a bodily dissection of labour, the execution felt a little brash. Shoring up the roads on which he drives, Bortoluci’s father, a lorry driver, is stationed on the front lines of Brazilian expansionism. There, he not only ventures into the political fantasy of a developed nation but becomes a seasonal visitor in his own life. It is, however, his cancer diagnosis which represents the final threshold. Entering the kingdom of the sick, his father reflects on his life work, lamenting the ephemerality of his personal legacy in the great national project. When he is due to undergo major surgery, he improvises a will out loud: “two or three accrued holidays, one late salary payment, a bit of cash to be reimbursed.”

As with Mike Campbell bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises, his father’s health declines in “[t]wo ways. Gradually and then suddenly”. Alongside his family’s slow reckoning with this fate, the intestines of the hospitalised president are laid out for debate on live TV. Public debate infringes on the body in several ways, both shaping political aims and constructing the metaphors of sickness. As with the photos of a lynching, Bortoluci writes, if one takes away the mutilated Black corpses, all that remain are excited white faces. His father’s body disappears from the picture of progress.

In this sense, the parallels between frontier logic and cancer make sense, but their connection is sloppily made, more closely resembling a project on family history than a novel academic venture. As a fan of Audre Lorde, Svetlana Alexievich, and Susan Sontag among others, I felt that this stacking of key thinkers was artlessly done and a little predictable.

Bortoluci realises that his father’s story cannot be told in an academic language alien to him, yet this is precisely the vocabulary which he uses throughout the book. His father’s body is first confined to serving a political mission he is disenfranchised from, then to his own sick body, and finally to his son’s ‘enlightened’ jargon.

A lovely memoir written by an academic sociologist about his father , a Brazilian truck driver , pulling in threads of class, power, relationships and love. At times becomes very academic in style but always recovers to more literary tone within a paragraph or two. I really enjoyed this

What Is Mine was so much more than what I expected and I am grateful to both Jose Henrique Bortoluci and his Father for sharing their memories, relationship and perspective of Brazil with the reader.

Bortoluci's expertise as a sociologist means that what appears to be a memoir recording a retired truck driver's trials and tribulations becomes an explorative study of Brazil, the Amazon, capitalism and consumerism, fascist politics, and immigration; all alongside the heartfelt and moving depiction of a father and son relationship facing illness and mortality.

Each chapter is clear in its focus and interweaves Bortoluci's father's memories with reflections upon Brazil in the past and what the family now face in the present. Any reader swiftly feels an attachment to the writer's father, one created with both awe and respect. He is a man who seems to have lived many lives through his one. We often consider time to be rushing by and the world running with it, but What Is Mine really pushes you to appreciate the generations of people who quite literally watched the landscape of their country change - most poignantly depicted through Bortoluci's focus on the Amazon rainforest and the destruction that continues to be perpetrated upon land and indigenous people.

It truly is a fascinating read but it remains grounded in family, love, aspirations and humanity which makes it all the richer.

While this book intrigued me, I found myself struggling to connect. This is not because I don’t relate, but because of the disjointed nature. We are never sure what time we are in, thus making it difficult to understand what was going on. The highlight was the discussion surrounding the language of illness, but that was sadly far too short. Had that been a major part of this book, I might have enjoyed it more. I also appreciate that the reader must educate themself on the conflicts referenced. Overall, I found this book to be lacking je ne sais quoi.

'What Is Mine' is a meditation on several abstract, subjective intersections - the individual and the family, the present and the past, sickness and health, progress and regression - but, at the same time, it is also expresses an interested in the interrogation of a more literal one: the traversing of roads; the act of crisscrossing across a country in the cabin of a truck. Interviewing his father, a former truck driver who spent weeks (and months) at a time driving across Brazil, far from his wife and children, José offers a tender and moving portrait of a father-son relationship which oscillates between closeness and distance; while his father's profession has led to long periods of time spent apart, and José's own career has created divisions of class and education, their bond is no less strong as a result - in fact, since his father's health has declined in recent years, their connection appears only to have deepened. While slim, the book still manages to pack a punch - both emotional and political - and Bortoluci's engagement with broader ideas (that of Brazil's difficult national identity, of the mechanics of labour and class and power structures) is as brilliant and clever as his autobiographical work.

Thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for thisARC!

A really devastating and tender account of a body, a life, a country. While technically a family memoir, the book also blends cultural history and a personal account of travel and a life spent on the road, so it does have something for everyone. Really gorgeous in parts, extremely honest and moving - another Fitzcarraldo hit I suspect.

Interesting little family memoir in which Bortoluci describes the recent history of Brazil on the basis of his father's adventures as a truck driver between the 1960s and 2010s. Especially during the early years, being a truck driver in Brazil has very little to do with bringing goods from A to B; it means building highways, repairing mudholes, spending days on river ferries and contributing to many of Brazil's megalomanic projects.

I read this together with the novel Crooked Plow, which has a very different perspective but covers similar Brazilian themes: inequality first and foremost, but also economic development, environmental degradation and deforestation, landgrabbing and violence.

Thanks to Fitzcarraldo and Netgalley for the ARC.