The Son Of Man: Jean-Baptiste Del Amo on Masculinity, Inherited Violence & Patriarchy

Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Service 95 Book Club. Today we have a very special guest for you, one of France's most exciting contemporary authors, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo. We'll be talking about his astonishing novel, The Son of Man. After a long and unexplained absence, a father returns to persuade his wife and young child to move to a run-down house in the mountains. It's unbelievably tense from beginning to end, and it had me asking questions about the legacy of trauma, the nature of violence, and whether we can break the chains. I'm looking forward to getting into all of that with Jean-Baptiste and with you. There's this one excerpt in the book that I thought was really powerful about inherited trauma. Some men are better left buried because actually they're simply waiting for someone to come and dredge them from their deep torpor so that they can resurface and endlessly repeat the same failures and the same disasters. Sometimes, you know, you feel that the book has its own logic that you have to follow. I didn't plan to write this monologue for the father, but writing the beginning, I understood that I needed to give him some voice at some point. I wanted this book to talk about this father and this son, but also all the fathers and all the sons, and the book to deal with the question of patriarchy and this repetition of violence. hi jean-baptiste how are you doing fine how are you uh i'm really really well thank you i'm so excited to talk to you today yeah super happy thank you for inviting me where are you right now i'm in france at some friend's house okay in the countryside yeah okay lovely did you get all the amazing snow that happened yeah just a little bit actually but it was really nice yeah yeah yeah it's amazing i'm in paris too and okay yeah yeah in paris i was like i caught it just at the at the right time i was like oh my gosh snow like this is super rare so yeah yeah it was pretty magical pretty magical um well i want to say thank you so much for joining me and hello to everybody listening. I've been, you know, so excited to share this moment with everybody. You know, I loved your book, The Son of Man. And this book had such a massive impact on me. And I feel like it's one of those books that's going to stay with me for a very, very long time. I read this book a few months ago when I was in New York. I was like in between legs of my tour. And I was about to go to South America and I always take a reading pile and it was really the title that struck me. And I was like, okay, I was like, let's see the son of man. It felt like grand and biblical. And, and I was like, all right, let's do it. And very, very quickly, um, I knew that this was my, my kind of, my kind of book. And I do have to say, um, I do have to give a little bit of a trigger warning because it's dark even for me. Um, but I just, I couldn't shy away from a book that I think I think about almost every day it's yeah it's just so so powerful and moving and and i guess to give a little bit of context before we begin the novel focuses on three characters it's a mother her nine-year-old son the father um who shows up at the at the start of the story after a really long and unexplained absence um and he kind of he persuades them to move to this rundown house in the mountains with them, which leaves us with a lot of questions like, why did he leave? And where did he go? And so I thought, let's just, let's just start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning, which, which I guess is not really the beginning at all, because there's this prologue involving a prehistoric deer hunt and something that kind of initially appears to be totally unconnected to the novel. And I'll be honest, I heard about the novel, but not about the prologue. And I did wonder at first, I was like, am I in the right book? Why did you decide to start the novel here? So I think I really wanted to open with an initial act of violence that will set the tone for the rest of the story. to me it was a way to show the cycle of violence being passed down from times and through times and from a generation to another and it was also a metaphor for how violence is ingrained in human nature in patriarchy and how it's passed culturally so i knew that it wouldn't have any immediate relationship with the rest of the story but i wanted it to work like some echoes during the the reading of the main story and it was important for me to to to write this prologue and to to show the reader that this book is an intimate story about a family but it has also a way a bigger a connotation a bigger meaning yeah i think on reflection having read the book and now understanding the prologue too you can completely see the comparisons and i want to get definitely into that nature versus nurture thing a little bit more. But I guess once we leave the caves and we start the novel itself, things get more and more unsettling. You know, as you mentioned, father reappears into the lives of a woman and their child and in this kind of, I guess, like unremarkable French town. And he shows up unannounced at the garden gate while the child's playing. And from that point on, I think you had me at the edge of my seat. You know, we understand quite quickly that we're flitting between past and present and that these two kind of states constantly interact. And that really, really builds a lot of tension as we uncover like their backstories. And we kind of inch closer to, I don't know, this looming threat of danger. tell me about how you created this really powerful sense of menace so the inspiration of this book really stems from the previous one animalia which tells the story of a family in the south of france through a century and five generations and with the son of i when i finished this one I had this feeling that I maybe left something in a blind spot, looking for primal images of violence and how it is transmitted. So I wanted to change the lens, change the focus and just try to see what I could do with three characters, like a nuclear family, a mother, a father, a son, and almost a single place. and it's not that easy when you start writing a story with just three characters to create a suspense so i understood very quickly that i i had to work on on on the temporality on the time of the story to reveal some details from their past story from their past life and also I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the son. So he doesn't know his father. He just has some very small memories. You've seen some pictures of him, but he has to understand who this man is and why he takes them to this mountain, to this remote place. so um telling the story from the the boys point of view was also a way for me to um put the reader at the same place uh you you don't immediately have the answers to the questions you you have to take your time and to yeah to wait until you understand the dynamics of this family absolutely absolutely and i felt that throughout you know i felt like it was such a such a journey But one thing that I thought was really interesting was it very clear as soon as we as we meet the father that there this animalistic kind of feral energy about him You know there this I don know incredible scene where after six years away he kind of strolls in the kitchen he opens up the fridge and he eats this half finished roast chicken with his bare hands, with like precise anatomical descriptions, which I think would put you off poultry for life. And he's hoping to reunite with his wife and child. And, you know, it's interesting because he's kind of gone to the trouble of getting a haircut. And his appearance is described as once white sports socks, black with dirt, the cuffs disappearing beneath denim jeans smeared with oil and grease. And he just goes upstairs, falls asleep on the bed, and the mother comes home from work. And it's almost like he doesn't really understand social code, or like he doesn't care or something? Yeah, I think the father remains quite opaque throughout the story, largely because we experience the story from the son's perspective. But it's also that I'm drawn to characters with complex and nuanced motivation. I love exploring those gray areas that lie between clear-cut moral categories and the father is not immediately an evil figure but you quickly feel that his presence by itself is threatening threatening yeah yeah there's something darker there absolutely and when they arrive in this remote place uh this threat will will grow uh and be more and more palpable for the child and for the mother. Yeah, so we have this very fragile family unit, you know, and like we said, the three characters. The interesting thing is none of them are named, which is also another very interesting thing because it's, I guess it's a claustrophobic feeling, but mostly, like you said, you're getting this understanding of the events through the eyes of the child. But what's interesting was as I was reading the book, I was speaking to a friend of mine and they were like, oh, what are you reading? And so I said, um, son of man. And as I was describing it, it's like, wait a second, the characters don't have names. It kind of happened. Like as I was reading, I was so engrossed in, in the story. Tell me about this, this decision to not give them names. So initially I considered, uh, giving the characters names, but I realized that doing so would anchor them in a very specific social reality and instead I wanted them to possess a more mythical and universal dimension that allows them maybe to resonate on a deeper and more timeless level. I wanted to tell a story of a particular family but at the same time I wanted these characters to embody a universal dimension. Their story needs to resonate beyond the personal and maybe on a broader scale. Okay. So to recap, there's this strange man who just waltzes into the life of his family after a long absence. And that's unexplained, but it kind of appears to involve that maybe he's involved in some kind of criminal activity. And he decides that he doesn't just want to move back to their working class estate, but to move them to a remote and dilapidated house on the mountain called Les Roches. Absolutely. Les Roches, which translates to the rocks. And there's just this very tense trek up the mountains. And in the middle of the night, that kind of raises all these unanswered questions. Where are they heading? Who will know that they're there? Why are they even going there? what what light can you shed on the father's state of mind at this point well um because there's this kind of determination yeah determination in a way we quickly understand that he lived there in this house in this remote place with a very harsh father and going back to this place he will be like haunted by his own past and he will slowly loses his fits so yeah I really wanted this setup then the remote house to to be a way for the father to isolate the mother and the child. I don't think that his motivations are necessarily bad at the beginning. Maybe he wants to rebuild a relationship with them. But he will be soon overwhelmed by the memories of his home past and childhood, yeah. So they come to this house. The father wants to kind of bring the family to start again. and this moment where the mother kind of reassures the child that they're going to be back in town for the start of the school term. But you know as a reader that this is a lie because the father's stocked up all the stores full of food and fuel and clearly it seems like he's been planning ahead and at this point I'm kind of getting the Shining vibes, I feel, a little bit. Is that a fair comparison? Yeah, absolutely. And then there's this monologue in the middle of the book where the father finally reveals his own relationship, you know, as you've just mentioned to Lerosh with his father. And it's really significant because I think it really casts a light on both the first and the second half of the book. You know, he's explaining the horror of living with his cruel father and you think, oh, this is like the time to break the cycle because you know violence feels very baked in the novel from the opening hunt do you see violence here as something that's learned inherited or do you think it's something that's simply inevitable oh so i i'm not even sure that i have an answer you know um that's a a question yeah um actually to me literature especially fiction is it's a it's not really about providing answers but instead it's more posing questions and giving form to deep interrogations or to to fears uh without necessarily uh delivering a clear message so um yeah in my view the book suggests that the violence is inherited but also that I think all those characters are fighting with some determinisms whether they are social determinisms or family related determinisms or even economics economical determinisms so it's different types of violence um, um, and the characters are struggling with that to, to, to get free from this kind of, um, uh, heritage and repetition. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I do feel that I want to talk about the mother in a little bit as well, because I feel like she has her own, her own story in that, in that sphere. Um, but I guess despite the violence, this, this monologue is kind of, I don't know this, It's just this moment where we finally hear the father speak at length and he suddenly becomes more human, you know. And as you say, he's clearly haunted by his own past. Was it important for you to also humanize him before the horror is about to unfold? It was very important. And it was this moment when I wrote the book where I understood that sometimes, you know, you feel that the book has its own logic that you have to follow. I didn plan to write this monologue for the father but right in the beginning I understood that I needed to give him some voice at some point and to explain some parts of his own story and with this monologue i understood that this was the earth of the book it enlights the first part giving some answers to to the reader and probably to the son too. And it's also prepare the reader to the second part and to really understand what is going on, what is the mechanism of this violence. And actually, we don't really know if the father says those words. There is a kind of uncertainty about that. Or is it the son that is just imagining what the father could say because it's not really a realistic voice. The father doesn't speak much. And at this moment, it's just like a flow of words, of sentences. It's almost a confession, you know. But it was important for me to show his part of the story in order to not make him look like just as an evil character. And I also wanted the mother to be far more complex than just being a victim, you know? Yeah. We don't know exactly why she agrees to follow this man to the mountain. So many questions remain that the reader is left with and has to... Is left with, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting in hearing you talk about it. It also sounds like you started to write something and the character took over, you know, and the story itself kind of helped you follow through. There's this one excerpt in the book that I thought was really powerful about inherited trauma, where it says some men are better left buried because actually they're simply waiting for someone to come and dredge them from their deep torpor so that they can resurface and endlessly repeat the same failures and the same disasters. I mean, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit pessimistic, right? yes it is it is but i think it also gives a lot of color to the psyche of what's going on you know in his in his mind um and i guess we've established that this is a pretty intense book and and some people might be ready for a little lie down at this point but um i'll come back to the characters in in a moment um but i think this might be a good time for me to be able to ask you a little bit about the experience of writing this book you know what what does your writing process look like when you're inside a world like this you know and and do you think it's like a healthy place to spend your days well not exactly i have to say but you know when i'm writing this type of book i i live with it i dream of about it i i yeah it's always with me and it's also a nice feeling to be able to access to a different type of reality just when you open your laptop and you just dive into the book so it's it's a real relationship with those characters and even if the the dog that the book is dark it was a nice experience to to to live with them for two years for almost two years but at some point you just have to finish it and to let it go because it can also contaminate is it correct to say that to contaminate your reality you know so yeah and I think I found the beauty in the writing in the language it's it is a dark book but uh there is there is a voice i hope so at least there is a voice there is a beauty in it that can be found uh in the yeah in the language in the voice in the poetry in the description of the nature around um so it was an intense uh experience writing this one for sure yeah i know I have to agree with you that it is. It's beautiful, beautiful writing all the way throughout. And it's moving. What do you do to wind down after like long stints of writing? A lot of sports. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Six times a week. It's like my place to just. Amazing. Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, yeah, reading other books, listening to music, just live the real life. Sometimes it's also good. so yeah yeah it's very important so um but you know there is a strange thing it's when the book is done when it's published i almost forget all of it oh wow i remember it like a dream that i've done and the characters like someone i would have known in a past life but i lost the the track of this feeling of connection and sometimes if i if i open the book and just read a few lines i'm like did i really yeah yeah that's crazy yeah that's so amazing i'm i'm really curious to know like when you're writing do you think about who's going to read it i try to never think about the reader you know i think the writing has to be um something very deeply personal and sometimes even selfish as a process. It's about confronting me to my own fears, to my obsessions, and to this emotional journey that I experience as I craft the story. And it's only later, once the book is complete and ready to be shared, that I begin to consider the reader's experience. Right. And ultimately, I hope that the reader will connect with the book in a way that mirrors the intention and the emotion that I put into it. But you never know. You never know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's so cool. I feel the same way about music, you know. I'm sure you do, yeah. Whenever I write something, you know, sometimes when I feel like I'm writing things that are really personal, I'm like, oh my God. you know and then I just have to shut out the idea that someone's going to listen to it yeah so I can just write wholeheartedly and authentically absolutely and then deal with the consequences later um so I I completely understand and then again with the idea that once something's out into the world it almost like no longer belongs to you I always say that it's such a weird feeling because you obsess over something for years and years and you listen and you so meticulous about every word or sound or whatever it is and then afterwards it does feel like a like a dream and a moment in time and yeah um and i suppose it's the same with music but the reader comes with his uh own imagination uh exactly own sense yeah yeah so he will project something of uh him on a book or on a song and that's also the beauty of it was the beauty of it so yeah yeah the connection yeah the connection something i learned actually about you as i was preparing for this um conversation is that before you became a full-time writer you were a social worker absolutely and um i wonder how much of that experience influences how you write and how you perceive characters so actually i don't know if it comes from my previous work as a social worker or more from the way I just grew up in the south of France in a middle-class family. But I like paying attention to my characters, talking about people that are not often represented in literature, at least in French literature. And also, yeah, maybe it's just the way that I approach them without judging them ever. That's maybe the most important thing for me. I like complex characters and I never come with an idea of what they should be or should behave or how they should behave you know just come with an open mind I love that. I also wanted to ask you about the setting for the book, you know, the mountain itself, it's so looming and it gives you just such a sense of place. And is it a place you know well, or is it drawn from imagination? It just seems very, very precise. And I'm like, I'm guessing it's like french pyrenees absolutely yeah so my parents um rebuilt um um or fixed an old house in this area of the pyrenees and so when i was a child and a teenager i spent a few summers there in the mountains and so i knew the place i also needed to do some research about a specific theme like you know the geology for example or all the flowers I wanted the nature around to be almost a character by itself and I also wanted to use it as a way to suggest the emotions of my characters in this book I really tried to work more on images and sensations rather than on psychology or um so using the nature around uh the environment uh describing the lights upon my characters uh was a way for me to show something about their inner feelings and emotions i love that okay let's let's go back let's go back to the book and specifically to the to the mother because i want to talk about her a little bit more because she had a child when she was just 17 years old um and the signs i guess are already there that the father's dangerous and involved in some kind of pretty shady business and i'd actually i'd like to read a read a passage where she's remembering the time where she met him and okay and his friends because i think that kind of really puts you in her mind at the time. They were all 15, 18, 20 years old. They were all born here, had grown up here, and they already knew that most of them would grow old here. Trapped in the houses in this one-horse town, trussed and tethered in the hollow of this valley, held in a vice by the mountain, doomed to their fate as the sons and daughters of labourers, warehousemen, welders, quarrymen, caretakers, though some still dreamed of getting out. with the intense intoxicating feeling that their salvation depended on the greatest distance they could put between themselves and this town. At least that's what I longed for. I felt as though until then I'd been trapped in life's waiting room, submerged in a stultifying inertia, under the thumb of a mother who was stony, hostile, disapproving. I mean, I guess that we can take from this that she was kind of looking for her own, for her own escape. Yeah, absolutely. She grew up in this small town. She probably wanted another life. She wanted some freedom. She wanted a real love in her life that maybe would take her away from this place. and it didn't happen or she thought it might happen with the father which is not the right guy to follow so yeah that's really a character that i loved and had a lot of empathy for but she made a mistake she decided to trust him a second time now yeah yeah and it was it didn't escape me this kind of enormous contrast between the kind of trashy romantic novels that the that the mother kind of reads on repeat you know and her actual life there's this I don't know I thought it was just very very clever you know but also really poignant like what does that really say about her hopes and dreams yeah I think she's in love with the love you know she really wants to live the life that she reads in those novels. And that's maybe why she decides to trust the father and to follow him to this remote place, thinking that, yes, maybe he will want to rebuild the relationship with her and with the son. but as soon as they arrive at the ocean I think she she and she understands that that will not happen and that he will be a threat for her for the Sun and for the child that she's caring hmm yeah that wishful thinking didn't it didn't really know work out in her favor and then as As you say, then, of course, nine years later, she follows the father up the mountain. She's taking her son into a situation that clearly has to be potentially very dangerous because they'll be so isolated. And now we know she's pregnant again. And at this point, I guess it's clear that, you know, what she hoped would be an escape route actually becomes a trap. Yeah. There is so much more I want to ask you about this book because there are some very, very dramatic turns in the closing pages of the book. And it's such a thriller. But everything else that I wanted to talk about felt like a super spoiler. And personally, I just really loved the shock factor of the book. And so I've actually decided to refrain from talking about some of the things so people can find out for themselves. but I'm definitely going to ask you off camera. Okay. So instead, let's finish with the title, The Son of Man. Does it nod to the famous painting by Magritte? Is it about self-determination? I guess that's also quite biblical. Yeah, it's way more biblical that Magritte's painting wasn't an inspiration for this title, but I wanted a kind of, I don't know if I can say biblical title, but at least a title that would immediately anchor the book in a kind of mythology. And it's also, it's about, it's a book about fathers and sons. And yeah, I wanted this book to talk about this father and this son, but also all the fathers and all the son and to, to, uh, the book, to deal with the, the question of patriarchy and, and this repetition of violence. So, uh, I think I found the title pretty soon, uh, which is not always the case. And I decided to, to, to keep it. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, I mean, yeah, sometimes when you find something that, that just aligns so well with the story that you want to tell it just I think I mean it's perfectly fitting yeah it's perfectly fitting um Jean-Baptiste thank you so much thank you for this incredible conversation like I think I'm going to go away and read your novel from cover to cover again um for the French speaking listeners you are in for a real treat because there are four other novels from Jean-Baptiste for you to dig into for English speaking listeners I recommend to you that like me rush to pick up Animalia which is also translated into English by Frank Wynne. And for those who want more from Jean Baptiste, visit service95.com and our socials for his playlist and reading list. And look out for an additional podcast episode where Jean Baptiste answers your questions. You can sign up for free Service 95 Book Club, a newsletter to hear about my next monthly read. And for more recommendations and author interviews, follow us on Instagram at service95bookclub. Thank you so, so, so much. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Along with my new monthly reads, I'll also be sharing a conversation from the archive. Some of my favorite chats with the world's best writers over the past couple of years. Trust me, you won't want to miss them. Make sure you're following the Service 95 Book Club podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you love this one, why not leave us a review? Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.