Brother of the Above

Pontalis gathers a sequence of short essays around the phrase that gives the book its title, the line a biographical dictionary once reserved for the lesser sibling, the one recorded only as brother of the above. He reads brothers across literature and life, among them Van Gogh, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Stevenson, and Proust, and he circles back to his own elder brother and the rivalry that shadowed him.

The brother here is often less a person than a figure: the one who came first, the one imagined, the sibling barely born or half remembered. Pontalis follows the old violence that runs from Cain and Abel through jealousy and wished-for disappearance, and he sets it against the fragile promise carried by the word fraternity. Absence, in his account, does not empty a life; it organises one.

For a clinician the value lies in its ear. Pontalis attends to how a patient bears a sibling who was never quite there, and to what shared blood both binds and hides.