Goodreads review:
(content note contains spoilers)

<i>He explains that, in the beginning, long before humans, long before these mountains existed, there were other, more colossal mountains; that over the course of millions and millions of years, they were worn away to nothing. He also explains that, once these ancient mountains disappeared, the sea covered everything, that everything they can see now was once a raging ocean with unfathomable abysses inhabited by strange creatures, as attested by this ammonite fossil.</i>

i don’t know if i have the words to describe this novel. it’s achingly beautiful; it’s a waking nightmare.

the novel begins by following a tribe of pre-historic Neanderthals as they trek across our already ancient Earth, whipped by harsh winds, betrayed by infertile lands, roaming under an eternally beautiful sky. a child follows his father on a hunt for a deer. then the real narrative begins: a child, his mother, and recently returned father journey up a mountain to stay at the father’s childhood abode. the narrative spins between their time up the mountain and the moments after the father reappeared into the lives of the son and mother.

i can’t recall another book where the terrifying magnificence of nature is so aptly described. the lonely mountains and the dark forests, we see the French landscape through the boy’s timid, curious eyes. we also watch him observe the tense air between his mother and father, and we realise with the son the truly malevolent presence of the father. i was happily lost in the author’s sublime depictions of nature and humanity when the plot darkened and darkened. it became an increasingly difficult read.

<i>He casts a strangely distended shadow, a vision of disproportionate limbs, an evil doppelgänger that emanates from him, dogging his steps, aping his every gesture, every swing of the axe, every throw of the stone, in a way that is monstrous and terrifying.</i>

del Amo’s (and the translator, Frank Wynne) storytelling and imagery will stay with me for a long time. an absolute masterclass in writing. i come to expect very good things from Fitzcarraldo, but i was utterly blown away by the skill in this novel. this is one of those books i think everyone should read but i don’t know how i can recommend it to anyone — it’s so painful and it’s so scary.

the son of man is primal. it feels utterly timeless.

with thanks to Net Galley and Fitzcarraldo Edition’s for the advanced copy. The Son of Man is available in mid/late May.

content note (CONTAINS SPOILERS): features an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship, physical abuse also hinted at. death during childbirth, extreme threat to a child and a baby’s safety

Twitter review:
The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste del Amo. translated edition by
@Terribleman releasing in May from @FitzcarraldoEds

utterly beautiful, excruciatingly suffocating. unlike anything else i’ve ever read. preorder this NOW

with thanks to @NetGalley and @FitzcarraldoEds

'The Son Of Man' by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, beautifully translated by Frank Wynne, is my first ever ARC (from NetGalley, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions), which I am truly grateful for and was clearly extremely excited to read.

My excitement soon turned to great pleasure of indulging in meticulously crafted prose - a story of a nameless family, the mother, the son and the father, who has been absent for six years of a nine year old's life and suddenly reappeared, determined to win them back. Questions start to rise together with the feeling of unease, the suspense, as they meet again, leave the town, travel to a remote mountain to live in an unfinished house among nettles and tall pines, Les Roches. The story, told from perspectives of all three, paces slowly, until unfolds, plentiful of astounding descriptions by someone who loves to observe and sees, and depicts every detail with such accuracy and beauty the novel becomes better than a movie: you see it too, you sense it, you smell it, you feel - from the drone views of the surroundings to an eye of an animal, to a dream of a child.

The beginning in prehistoric times, a seemingly unrelated chapter, depicts the same themes found throughout the story, which takes you back and forth in time, from the new place to the old one, before and after, here and there. A rather simple plot with masterful use of language makes you reflect and think deeply about the cycle of life, love, temporariness, brutality, insignificance, generations and generational traumas, loss, relationships of men and sons and women, life in the world and in nature, which almost becomes a separate character itself - all intertwined.

In a great work of literary fiction I look for means of expression, the same things discussed and talked about a myriad times told in a different way. And all of it is found in abundance in this brilliant read.

A meditation.


A sometimes brutal examination of legacy and nature-versus-nurture. Somewhat excruciating in parts but it rewards the effort.


Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC

A very slow burn novel that follows the relationship between sons and fathers. The story follows the lives of a son and his mother after the reappearance of his absent father. The father, in turn, tells the story of his difficult relationship with his own father.

The novel is split into two timelines - the first involves the family's relocation to the father's mountain home at Les Roches; the second deals with the father's reappearance in the mother's life after many years absence.

As time goes on it becomes clear that the boy's father is just as inept at home building as his own father and all the feelings of fear that he will be abandoned serve only to make the father more domineering and paranoid. His erratic behaviour mirrors that of his own father whose body was discovered at Les Roches years before - almost naked and emaciated.

The novel is cleverly constructed giving away the family's history slowly and building by increments until the explosive finish. You are fully aware of the father's incipient madness and the consequences it may have but the mother is there as a counterweight and tips the balance back when things seem to spiral. You know something bad could happen at any point but you simply don't know what, when or why.

Highly recommended.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the advance review copy. Most appreciated.

The story follows 3 nameless characters, Father, Mother, and Son, who reunite after 6 years of the father's absence. The family is nudged by the father to follow him to an idyllic country retreat, where the majority of the plot unfolds, seeing the small family torn apart by memories, fear, and suspicion.

There is a lot to like about the book. Thematically, the impact of dominant men on their families, and the root causes of this dominance (both from the men, and the compliant women) are well explored, without unnecessary tear-jerking. Instead, vivid and succinct prose takes the reader into a realm of horror, somewhat reminiscent of The Auctioneer, where the tension is palpable, and the discomfort omnipresent. This atmosphere is perhaps the most powerful aspect of this book. It's makes a story that otherwise could have been banal come alive and develop a life of its own. The namelessness of the characters is an astute decision, removing personalisation and making the story even more atmospheric.

What I failed to fully appreciate while reading the book is the premise that it's supposed to center around - that of the impact of fathers on their sons. While there are some interesting paragraphs that describe how the Father grew up with his own father, and how that impacted his psyche, these lack any flair. I could easily take the same premise and argue that all parents influence their children. Perhaps even more importantly - I could argue that whatever traumas children suffered at the hands of their parents this doesn't absolve them from responsibility for their own actions. I also found the culpability of the Mother underexplored - whatever happened in the book didn't just happen to her, neither in the distant past or during the book's "present". She participated, and there is some accountability that lies there as well. In this sense, the book's "demonisation" of men and their sons a bit too on the nose.

I recommend to those looking for beautiful prose and lovely storytelling, that delve and explore what makes a family tick. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but the book is still worth a read.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Wasnt crazy about this. It moved quite slowly and there was always the threat of violence but it didnt appeal to me in any way.
The mother seemed obsessed with the boy's hair and the father just seemed like a brute.

His first book was an absolute banger but for some reason this one just didn’t hit the same, and I don’t know why. It’s a lot shorter and has a lot less characters so think there just wasn’t enough to get my teeth into. There was definitely drama in this book similar to his last one but the drama seemed to be reserved until the very end and it was almost as soon as I got settled into the story it was over.

Del Amo is great at creating atmosphere in his work though and there is a real sense of dread through this entire work which keeps you reading. There is no point in this story where you feel safe and you are always waiting for more things to go wrong. He is a real master storyteller and also a master at focusing on what appears to be banal relationships and places but which have a very sinister feeling at their core. Will definitely be reading more of his work when it comes out in English.

“What he really wanted was to live dangerously, says the mother, there was nothing he liked better than to tempt fate. It was his idea of freedom, his idea of independence; in the end, maybe he wanted to wage war on life itself – the town had only been a backdrop and collateral damage for his revenge – to make up for the time he felt he had lost up in the mountains, under the strict, suffocating authority of his progenitor.”

The Son of Man is from the dream-team behind the Republic of Consciousness Prize winning Animalia - publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, translator Frank @terribleman Wynne and French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo. Fitzcarraldo's success means they've outgrown the 'small' criteria for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which they won twice, but this surely has to be a strong contender for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

The novel is largely narrated from the perspective of a young boy who lives with his mother, who had him when she was 17, in a cramped property in a small provincial town. His father disappeared when he was very young - his memories of him more dependent on comments from his mother and two photographs she has kept - and they've had no contact with him, until he suddenly reappears one day.

The father is fiercely determined to force them to become a family again, and drives the boy and his mother up in to the mountains, where they then undertake an arduous hike to a crude, ruined, inaccessible and isolated building Les Roches where he himself lived as a boy with his own father, which he attempts, rather hopelessly, to turn into a family home.

“He seems to have decided to do battle with this plot of land whose obstructiveness is an affront, to remove anything and everything that would thwart his plan, or to give free rein, with every swing of the pickaxe, to a blind fury for reasons the child cannot fathom.”

The novel starts with an italicized prequel of a pre-historic coming-of-age in a tribe of hunters, which sets the tone for what follows. The main narration alternates between the story of the three of them, alone, in Les Roches, almost set up as a survivalist shelter with months of preserved food supplies, and that of the man's return to the town, and to his wife and son, where we learn of his own back story, allowing us to understand the blind fury.

The man's own father, who was also originally from the town, had suffered two tragedies when the man was himself a young boy. Firstly the loss of his wife, the man's mother, after a two-year painful illness, and then an industrial accident that left him with one ruined arm. Driven by anger at his fate, he bought the dilapidated property at Les Roches and move their with the man, his young son, to live a hermit-like existence with almost no contact with the outside world. As the man became of age he fled back to the town below, never seeing his father again, but as he acknowledges the legacy of his father's bitterness remains within him:

“Something of the old man had seeped into me, his pain, his madness had insidiously, surreptitiously infected me. That’s where the people in the town were partly but not completely wrong in believing that the old man had fashioned me into the right arm of his vengeance, because when I resolved to turn my back on him, long after I discovered the mutilated birch trees, when I decided to leave Les Roches, never to come back while he was still alive, I had no thought of avenging him, but already, without knowing it, I was carrying inside me the deep-rooted seed of his hatred and his bitterness.”

The man himself, aged 15 on his first return to the town where he was born, threw himself into the social life of the town, becoming the leader of a gang of teenagers, with another youth Tony as his lieutenant, who progress from joy-riding to trafficking stolen cars over the mountains into Spain (and we realise the father's disappearance was connected to this, likely a prison sentence):

“It was as though the father had come down from the mountain with the sole intention of waging war on the town, and had found in Tony – or thought he had found –an alter ego, a mirror image, or at least a partner in crime for the drinking binges, the village dances that beat like a secret heart in the night, for settling scores in the smudged light of streetlamps or drunken dawns, for reckless drives behind the wheel of a Peugeot 405 GTI, a Polo G40 (sometimes a stolen Audi Quattro or a Toyota MR2) along steeply winding roads and mountain passes, headlights casting a harsh glare, by turns on the sheer rockface and the vertiginous blocks of darkness.”

To add to the father's bitterness and the dramatic tension of the novel, the boy's mother is, on his father's return, already pregnant, with Tony's child. And as her due date draws nearer, the father refuses her entreaties that she really needs medical assistance, turning what starts as something of a slow-paced rural idyll into a tense horror story as the latent violence erupts to the surface:

“As she draws nearer, they see her defeated face, her anguished eyes looking from father to son, from son to father, while around them all is still, but for a slow, languorous vibration that might be called epidermal, since it seems to disturb only the surface of the grass, the trees, the observable reality, while the heart of the forest and the stony depths of the mountain remain frozen in hieratic indifference, and the sight of the mother painfully struggling up the steep meadow towards them, moving through this landscape transfigured by the sun, reminds the son of the reproduction of the painting by Andrew Wyeth pasted to a sheet of cardboard, hanging in a clipframe on the bedroom wall of the cramped house in the town.”

This a reference to Christina's World, a painting the boy's mother saw in a magazine in a doctor's waiting room, which she surreptitiously pocketed and framed.

As with Animalia, Wynne's rendition of Del Amo's prose is vivid, visceral and poetic at the same time, with luscious prose:

“Spring arrives, sharp as a blade.

One morning, they find the mountain ablaze with shimmering light. The air smells of claggy soil, of clover and grass thick with sap. Rocks glitter beneath a white-hot sun set into a sky of deep blue that it liquefies.

From everywhere comes the song of birds, the chirrup of insects, the cry of unseen animals that lurk in what little shadow remains, in the hollows of roots, under the leaves of evergreens, at the entrance to labyrinthine burrows – patiently dug or bitterly won – hidden by a bent twig.

Sent coursing through the branches of the trees, the sap causes myriad buds to open, their tiny perules silently falling away to reveal the blue-green leaves that unfurl and constellate the boughs with vibrant green.

The forest, hostile and barren only the day before, adorns itself with vaporous whorls, dappled shadows that make it seem less fearsome. Over the grasslands, flowers in their myriad variation open their petals; foraging insects feverishly buzz from bloom to bloom, drunk on nectar. The wind rustles through the branches of the pines, raising clouds of yellow pollen that fill the sky and are dispersed by the breeze.

In the dark chambers of the rotting trunks, pupae prepare their metamorphosis; all around, an army of tiny creatures mobilizes – teeming, crawling, industrious swarms – and begin the mysterious enterprise that occupies them night and day.

As he becomes more familiar with his surroundings, the son ventures further and further. He no longer fears the marauding bear. He no longer feels the piercing eye of the forest trained on him. The mountain appears to have accepted his presence, and now contemplates him with an equable attentiveness.”

And there are a couple of nice nods to Animalia. The 'genetrix' term makes a welcome reappearance - this the boy's grandmother, who didn't approve of her daughter's marriage to the leader of the local gang:

“The crabbed flesh of her genetrix was always forced into severe skirts that never came above her knee, blouses buttoned at the throat and the wrists, her legs sheathed in opaque tights of sempiternal beige, such that she looks like a bourgeois lady from the provinces whose family fortune was squandered and whose only inheritance was an austere, outmoded or anachronistic wardrobe best suited to a governess or a stern post-war schoolmistress.”

And, in Animalia, there is a deliberately jarring scene where Éléonore sees an aeroplane in the sky, reminding us this is the 20th not the 19th century. Here a similar scene in the remote Les Roches reminds them that there is a society they've left behind:

“His muddy hands still clutch the handle of the pickaxe resting on his chest. Swathes of mist dissolve against the sky, revealing soaring heights of chalcedony blue across which the streamlined shape of a plane is slowly moving. Though no sound reaches their ears, the very sight of the plane is an unprecedented irruption of a parallel reality, the remanence of the world they left when they came to Les Roches and which no longer seemed to exist. They follow the path of the shimmering, surreal, tubular form of the fuselage as it appears and disappears, cleaving the cumulus clouds before disappearing behind the mountain ridge, leaving only a trail of condensation in its wake that quickly fades into azure.”

Stunning.

*A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.*

I´m afraid I knew nothing about Buckley prior to seeing his name in the latest Fitzcarraldo catalog, but this description got me interested.
The novel´s about an art collector/businessman gone missing. Told by his gardener. In a series of interviews.
„I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?“

It turns out that pretty soon into the story one starts regarding the main characters, the main narrative as a background one (almost?), and begins wondering about the gardener – the way she´s talking one could hardly doubt she´s telling the truth, but how could she know all these things? And, going deeper and deeper into Doyle´s (the businessman) life she reveals herself as a skillful narrator who enjoys telling a story and plays with its shape – there are jokes, digressions, cliffhangers... She enjoys the control she has - so much so that she tries to control the making of the film as well (that´s what the interviews are for). "It could be a good scene.", she suggests. Or: "If you´re going to have flashbacks, Lily has to be the main one.“

One of the central preoccupations of the novel is memory, remembering. It´s auto-thematized by the narrator herself, making her even more interesting. Much of what she knows comes from the house staff or other people Doyle was in contact with, which means that, in some cases, the story we get has already been filtered thrice. So, just how unreliable is she?
A mystery behind the mystery. Juicy!

A pretty bleak tale, I fear, but such good writing.

A son and a mother live happily together until, after years of absence, the father comes back, intending not only to stay, but to build up a new life in an isolated, half-finished house in the mountains.

The first half of the book gave me such negative feelings that I considered giving up. The father is just horrible. But curiosity won and I raced through the second half when it almost becomes a thriller, with the alternating chapters between backstory and the present day horror of the mountains.

I hadn't heard of this author but I suspect a lot of readers will appreciate the evocative writing.

A novel about intergenerational trauma and toxic masculinity, written in beautiful prose (English translation), and well paced as a slow burn with a lot of intrigue to keep those pages turning. I cared about the protagonist, a young boy, from the outset and enjoyed seeing the parents' flaws through his eyes. The characters are characterised in a very believable way through little scenes that are ofter cryptic to the protagonist but meaningful to the reader.
Towards the end it becomes quite dark and disturbing, and I enjoyed many of the details of earlier plot lines coming together in the ending making it feel like a well rounded story.

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo and Netgalley for the ARC.

Translated novels can often lose the magic of the original pose, however, Le Fils de l'homme is still beautiful written and richly descriptive. The story examines the relationships between sons and fathers, a dynamic which in some ways has evolved little since prehistoric man, with violence and madness passed down from one dysfunctional relationship to the next. In this novel we have The Father, The Mother, and The Son, following this family as they retreat away from civilisation to a remote cottage in the mountains, at the demand of the previously absent father who wants to connect to his family and resolve his own troubled past. The fourth main character is nature, which persists throughout as a challenge and a reflection of the often primal relationships between the family members. This is an intense but fast-paced novel, the plot is not a surprise but the themes are incredibly interesting.