Didier Eribon

Didier Eribon had actually planned to travel to Fismes regularly from now on. But his mother dies a few weeks after moving into a nursing home in the small town in Champagne. As in “Returning to Reims”, this turning point becomes the starting point for a journey into the past. Eribon reconstructs the biography of a woman characterised by scarcity and constraints, who remained chained to a brutal husband and even had to be modest in her dreams. “My mother,”he notes, “was unhappy all her life.” Didier Eribon's new book is highly political: he relentlessly exposes the extent to which politics, philosophy and society have long suppressed the scandalous situation of many old people. At the same time, he once again proves himself to be a great storyteller: using evocative episodes and touching memories, he shows how important family and origins are for identity. He buys a dialect dictionary so that he can once again hear his mother's voice. In this way, the sociologist unfolds a portrait of a lost world: the milieu of the French working class - with its worries, its solidarity, its prejudices. Didier Eribon, born in Reims in 1953, is a French sociologist, author and philosopher. His book “Returning to Reims” (st 5313), originally published in 2009, made him famous in German-speaking countries in 2016. The autofictional essay was received as a literary event and a key text on the rise of right-wing populism.