PinT Book Club 17th session

Welcome to the 17th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss What is Mine alongside Brazilian author José Henrique Bortoluci and translator Rahul Bery. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). The book was published in 2024 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

About the book

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 including the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a scheme spearheaded by the military dictatorship of the time, undertaken through 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. Bortoluci weaves the history of a nation with that of a man, uncovering parallels between cancer and capitalism – both sustained by expansion, both embodiments of ‘the gospel of growth at any cost’ – and traces the distance that class has placed between him and his father. Influenced by authors such as Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich, What Is Mine is a moving, thought-provoking and brilliantly constructed examination of the scars we carry, as people and as countries.

José Henrique Bortoluci was born in Jaú in 1984. He has a BA in International Relations and an MA in Social History from the University of São Paulo, as well as an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, where he lectured and was a Fulbright fellow. He is a professor of Sociology at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, where his lectures and research revolve around Brazilian politics, social theory, democracy and social movements. 

Rahul Bery is based in Cardiff, Wales and translates from Spanish and Portuguese to English. His published translations include novels by Vicente Luis Mora, Afonso Cruz, Simone Campos and David Trueba.

Praise for WHAT IS MINE:

"[Bortoluci] combines the recent history of his family with that of Brazil, contextualizing his father’s life and drawing uncomfortable parallels between cancer and capitalism: both must be sustained by expansion, both are embodiments of “the gospel of growth at any cost”…. The road may be an overused metaphor but it is skilfully and movingly deployed by Bortoluci and his translator Rahul Bery, who captures all the nuances of the author’s discussions with his father. What Is Mine – the title evokes Didi at last claiming his own story – takes the reader on a journey not only through the life of an ordinary Brazilian truck driver but through the changing relationship of father and son as the latter follows his own very different road."

— Anna Temkin, Times Literary Supplement

"A very beautiful book."

— Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022

"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

"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

"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