Returning Home

Name: Returning Home
ISBN: 9787553518510

迪迪埃·埃里蓬 / 王献Shanghai Culture Publishing House · ChinaOct 2020

4.5

Word count: 101K words
Chapters: 25
ISBN: 9787553518510

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Summary

Returning to Reims is a reflective sociological work by the French philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon, written from his own experience. After his father's death, Eribon decides to return to his birthplace, Reims, to rediscover the social class he came from and the people he had left behind thirty years earlier. He revisits the past, reviews his family history, recalls the working-class milieu of his childhood, and traces how he went from a poor child of a worker's family to a prominent French intellectual... In this deeply personal and unsettling inner journey, the author reflects on social class, schooling, identity formation, and other themes, tracing the fates of different individuals within collective determinism and analyzing how people's "personal choices" are shaped and determined by different social environments.

Editor's review

Returning to Reims is a work of self-examination by the French philosopher Didier Eribon; its Chinese edition holds a Douban rating of 9.0. This is not a work of fiction but the author's candid record of confronting his own class betrayal and fractured identity. Born into a working-class family, Eribon rose through education into the Parisian intellectual elite, yet after his father's death he returns to the hometown he left thirty years earlier, prompting a profound reckoning with class, education, family, and the self.

The book's value lies in its distinctive angle: the author turns a sociologist's keen eye on his own life, elevating personal pain into an analysis of structural oppression. He faithfully traces how he was shaped by his family of origin and social environment, exposing the cruelty of education as a vehicle for class mobility: it is not only a path to liberation but also a source of alienation, severing the individual from the past and leaving him an exile in spirit.

Eribon's prose is calm and restrained, preserving a scholar's caution even in the most intimate emotional territory. This tension between reason and feeling is precisely what gives the book its intellectual force: it shows how a person, by making peace with himself, arrives at a clear understanding of how society operates. Its depiction of working-class life in France offers a cross-national reference point for understanding social mobility.

As readers, we follow Eribon's journey home and witness not only the microhistory of a family but also the identity anxiety pervasive in modern society. For anyone who has ever felt torn apart on life's path, this book offers profound healing and insight.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in class mobility and identity
Those who have crossed urban-rural or cultural divides and felt alienated
Readers who enjoy writing that blends personal narrative with social analysis
Those exploring the relationship between family of origin and self-construction

Not a good fit for

Readers of novels seeking gripping plots and character development
Readers looking for light, leisurely reading

Reading tips

Best read alongside Paul Willis's Learning to Labour or Annie Ernaux's works to deepen understanding of class reproduction
Pay attention to how the author turns personal experience into structural analysis—the methodological heart of the book
Read with your own family background in mind, but avoid simple identification; note the specific French social context

About the publisher

Shanghai Culture Publishing House China · Founded in 1955

Shanghai Culture Publishing House focuses on practical living and popular culture, while also building a concentrated list in adjacent knowledge areas such as foreign literature, Western philosophy, military studies, and politics. Representative titles in the library include Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The World as Will and Representation; Goethe's Faust; the Homeric epics (8 volumes); and Carl von Clausewitz's On War, along with Flatland. In terms of translators and authors, Chen Zhongmei, Tian Linian, Qi Jiafu, and Ruan Huishan have contributed to related titles. The press is characterized by connecting classic texts with the reading needs of a general audience, balancing cultural accumulation with knowledge popularization. Given limited public information, this description emphasizes the publishing directions reflected in the library's books.

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FAQ

Is this book a memoir or a sociological work?

Both. It unfolds in autobiographical form, but its core is social analysis through personal life experience—a classic example of 'autoethnography' that fuses intimate narrative with scholarly reflection.

Does the author ultimately reconcile with his hometown?

What Eribon presents is not reconciliation in the conventional sense, but a complex and clear-eyed understanding. He comes to see how family and social environment shaped him, accepts that this rupture and contradiction are part of who he is, and thereby gains a calm, intellectual reconciliation.

Can non-French readers understand the book?

Absolutely. Though set in a French working-class community, its themes—the cost of education as a ladder of class ascent, generational family conflict, identity struggles—are universal. The Chinese translation is fluent, and Chinese readers' own experiences of rural-urban migration and education easily resonate.

Who is Wang Xian?

Wang Xian is the Chinese translator of this book, a translator of French literature who has rendered works including The Years and The Melancholy of Resistance. His translation accurately conveys Eribon's calm yet tense prose style.

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About the author

迪迪埃·埃里蓬 Author

Didier Eribon is a French writer whose representative work Returning to Reims is classified under foreign literature in the Chinese-speaking world. Publicly available information about him is limited: his dates of birth and death, details of his nationality, and a complete career record are not documented in our database, making a systematic account of his life difficult. Returning to Reims reveals a style of writing marked by personal retrospection and social observation. He often begins from his own experience and connects it to questions of family, class, and identity, with a calm and restrained tone that is both literary and intellectual. This approach—examining individual memory within social structures—gives the work both intimacy and analytical force, and holds a certain appeal for Chinese readers interested in social class and self-identity.

王献 Author

Wang Xian is an author about whom little public information is currently available; the library holds only one work by this name, Returning to One's Hometown. The book is classified under foreign literature, a category suggesting that its subject matter relates to translated works or to narratives set against an unfamiliar cultural background, yet the available information is not enough to confirm the author's nationality, dates of birth and death, or English name. As for Returning to One's Hometown itself, the title carries a clear sense of homecoming and search, evoking writing about one's native place, memory, and belonging: characters often look back at where they came from after having left, recognizing their own place amid familiar scenery and the changes in people and things. Such material usually does not rely on sharp plot conflict but places greater weight on narrative tone and the texture of detail, revealing the complicated ties between people, land, and family through everyday experience. Because the library's material is limited, Wang Xian's other writing experience, broader body of work, and overall style cannot yet be fully described, and the influence of this work awaits confirmation from more readers and sources.