Drew’s Reviews > Retour à Reims > Status Update

This book is a fascinating read & best when Eribon is relating his own experience in his working class family and his perilous path through the French education system. There are more theoretical passages on political and sociological topics that are denser and - for this second language reader - more difficult to understand, but even here he manages to expose by his own success the near impossiblity of "making it".

Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux in its frank, often devastating reflections on working-class lives in provincial France, but in Eribon's case the view is more forensically academic. His self-analysis is pitiless: his discomfort with his roots in the classe ouvrière, his hypocritical idealisation of a revolutionary working class while rejecting his own family; but also his fulsome criticism of other academics.

An interesting mediation on origins, self-determination and social framing. How do we become who we are? What do we give up in order to do that, and how does that affect ourselves and those we leave behind?
Eribon's style has a ponderous and circumlocutory aspect but that's alright by me. It's not like everyone has to write like Hemingway.