‘A Dutiful Son’ reads like a novel, a Bildungsroman charting the character’s journey from pious Catholic child to leading philosopher and writer on French culture. The key figure in Pascal Bruckner’s life is his father, a virulent anti- Semite, who voluntarily went to work in Germany during the war, and a violent man who beats his wife. The young Bruckner soon reacts against his father and his revenge is to become his polar opposite, even to the point of being happy to be called a ‘Jewish thinker’, which he is not: ‘My father helped me to think better by thinking against him. I am his defeat.’ Despite this opposition, he remains in some way tied to his father to the very end. He has other ‘fathers’, men such as Sartre, Vladimir Jankelevitch and Roland Barthes who fostered his philosophical development, and describes his friendship with his ‘philosophical twin brother’, Alain Finkielkraut. AUTHOR: Pascal Bruckner is best known as a controversial philosopher. Three of his essays: The Tyranny of Guilt, Perpetual Euphoria: On the duty to be Happy and Has Marriage for Love Failed? were published to great acclaim in English translation in 2011-13. His fiction includes ‘Lunes de fiel’ which was made into the film Bitter Moon by Roman Polanski and ‘My Little Husband’ published by Dedalus in 2013.