Not Everybody Lives the Same Way

Paul Hansen reflects on his life while serving a prison sentence in a Canadian jail. This novel was quite different from what I expected, but despite this, it was a very good read.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

Snow has been falling for the last week. By the window, I watch the night and listen to the cold. In this place, the cold actually makes a noise. A particularly dreadful sound as if the building, caught in the vice-grip of ice, were crying out in anguish, in pain, cracking as it contracts. At this time of night, the prison is sleeping. After a certain amount of experience, once a man grows accustomed to its metabolism, he can hear it breathing in the dark like a large animal, coughing, swallowing. The prison assimilates and digests us, and huddling in its belly, hidden in the numbered folds of its entrails, within the spasms of its gut, we sleep and live the best we can.

Details:

• author: Jean-Paul Dubois
  
• full title: Not Everybody Lives the Same Way
  
• genre: literary fiction
  
• format/type: bookfiction
• country: France, Canada
  
• topics: #lifestory, #prisoners
  
• publisher: Harry N. Abrams
  
• publish date: March 29, 2022
• pages: 204
  

Literary Awards:

•  Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2019
  

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙

About the Author:  

Jean-Paul Dubois (b. 1950) is a French journalist and author. He is the author of several novels and travel pieces, and reports for Le Nouvel Observateur. His novel, Une vie française, published in French in 2004 and in English in 2007, is a saga of the French baby boom generation, from the idealism of the 1960s to the consumerism of the 1990s. The French version of the novel won the Prix Femina. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2019 for Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon ("All Men Do Not Inhabit This World in the Same Way"), a novel told from the perspective of a prisoner looking back on life.