Sixty Years Young

Erudite and sensitive, author Michel Robin has earned the wisdom that worldly experience of six decades confers on a reflective man. But in Sixty Years Young, he goes back through time to confront the child that he was and to embrace the ways in which that boy is still who he is now. In the tradition of philosophers' and poets' courageous childhood confessionals, yet with an honesty and clarity all his own, he gives us a real narrative of childhood seen through un-tinted glasses. Revisiting his boyhood becomes a quest for truth. The truth of the man he has become. The wider truth of the world as the boy saw it, the world that grew up around him. The tales of his truths make for episodes at times delightful, at times embarrassing, and always incisive. This is no safe stroll down Memory Lane. The author relives the beauty and tyranny of being a child. Young Michel commands fairness into his universe with toy soldiers shared with the neighbor boy across the fence of social divide. He lights matches to the housecat's whiskers. He pursues his first love with a barrage of letters, and gets punished by the school priest. He parries adult intervention with subterfuge or flashes of contrition. Older Michel dissects his world - our world - with the keen intransigence of the boy. It's a dialogue between two selves. A protest against malice and hypocrisy. A hand held out for love. An ode to life. It's also an evocation of Belgium in the post-war years. There are tensions among family members around issues of class and religion. Puritanism contends with fascination for movies, fast cars, beautiful girls. People, events, beliefs all loom into the lens, held in the same lucid gaze, by the boy and by the man that boy has become. As if yesterday was still today.