Jean-Baptise Del Amo Reads From The Son Of Man, Dua’s Monthly Read For February 2026

Hi, I am Jean-Baptiste Delamour and my book, The Son of Man, is due as monthly read for February. I'm going to read an excerpt which takes place in the middle of the book and where the character of the father tells his son about his idea of love. He leads the boy towards the wellspring, towards the granite slops shining in the July sun, all bristling with blades. This time, the father follows closely behind as they roam the light-dazed mountain beneath a white hot sky. Initially, they are engrossed in the walk, but in fact the father's silence is filled with words, inhabited by a voice that comes from within and is echoed by the whole vast mountain or else from without an ageless toneless disembodied voice that dissolves into the ether where it continues to exist so when the father walking behind him finally speaks the son is not surprised the voice seems to have preceded itself to have hung over them for a long time since before they left the house at les roches or indeed before they left the town for the mountains so much so that the son could say the words in his stead and in the moment when the first word forms on the father's lips the boy realizes that the revolver and the idea of teaching him to shoot were only ever a pretext for the father's words to become incarnate, to unfurl, to reach that one objective, the lone target, the boy's hurt. The father says he has and will only ever have one son, that he is not the father of the child the mother is carrying. The mother did not deceive him, he says but rather she betrayed his trust which is worse since in all the time he has been absent he never imagined her capable of betrayal and if there is one thing the father tells the son in that erratic monotone one thing a man cannot endure it is to be betrayed in love Doubtless, the son is too young to know what love is, too young even to imagine what it might be. Yet the father warns him not to believe anything that people usually say about love The sentimental twaddle the empty phrases that probably fill the pages of the trashy woman novels the mother reads with the smug unwolesome eagerness and which over time probably warped her mind so don't the father says in the same unearthly monologue Don't believe any of it. Love is only stimulated by desire. Love is just the other name, the acceptable name we give to desire. In other words, to lust, and it will use any means necessary to win the object of its lust. Love is a disease, a virus that infects the hurts of men. A heart that is already sick, already rotting, already corrupted, eaten away by gangrene since time immemorial, whose depth it would be futile to try to fathom. I'm telling you this now for the sake of the men you'll be one day, never fall in love. No good can come of it. For humans, more than any other beast that roams this cursed earth are born with this void inside, this dizzying void they desperately strive to fill throughout their brief, inconsequential, pitiful time in this world paralyzed as they are by their own transience their own absurdity their own vanity and by the preposterous notion planted in their heads that in one of their fellow creatures they might find the wherewithal to fill this void, this emptiness that preceded their existence, just like you might try to fill grave with a shovel full of earth. In doing so they quickly forget that the void is bottomless, the Father says, that this gaping wound in the hurts of men is never sated, never healed. We love and we experience the illusion of living. We love and we believe we have found a meaning in things, a reason, an order to the chaos. when actually love infects us, corrupts our souls, our hurts. We should love everything equally or love nothing at all. Because to place all one's hopes in a single creature as fallible, as flawed, as devious as a human being, one that contains such abyssal depth, is nothing short of madness. It is nothing but an expression of utter desolation. Thank you.