'A sons journey, around father and country, subtle and complex, tender and brutal; an intimate work of rare beauty and power.
Philippe Sands, author ofEast West Street
What IsMineis 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 ofFatherhood
'A political document told as memoir, this is a bookof 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 ofThe Inland Sea
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 ofEveryday Madness
What Is Mineis both a political history of Brazil and a devoted paean to a parent and child bond that remains tenderly interwoven across social stratification. With boundless love and empathy, Bortoluci deftly elucidates the fateful relation between bodies, nations and ecologies, and the ways in which the cancer in Didis endurant body is itself colonial, as likewise, ecocidal expansion across Brazil is carcinogenic, both working by expansionist logics.
Abi Andrews, author ofThe Word for Woman Is Wilderness
Jose Henrique Bortoluci'sWhatIs Mineis an extraordinarily powerful portrait of a man's life, a country's course and the "ancient marriage between shamelessness and devastation" in Brazilian history. Tender, thought-provoking, incisive and humane, it's a deeply intelligent road movie for the soul. A beautiful and moving journey through a trucker's memories of a changing nation and a vital meditation on class, capitalism and, above all else, the search for human dignity. Utterly transfixing.
Julian Hoffman, author ofIrreplaceable
The reflection on Brazilian problems (the disastrous Amazon integration project, the country's political deterioration) and also on issues that recur regardless of geography (the exploitation of the working class and the environment, disease, relationships between parents and children) is one of the triumphs ofWhat Is Mine.
O Globo
Father Jose Bortoluci, Didi, embodies a figure at once fundamental and renegade in Brazilian history, ignored in national narratives or condensed into an abstract stereotype.... The book gives a name and individuality to the truck driver.
Folha de S. Paulo
