The Man I Became

Verhelst's novel opens in the first-person narrative of a young gorilla. The narrator and his family are captured from their home in the jungle by poachers. The family is chained together and forced to march to an unknown destination, with some members dying from the harsh conditions of the journey. The caravan eventually reaches a coast where the prisoners are crowded into a ship and sent on a long journey overseas. Finally, the ship reaches a large, man-made facility, where the family is divided by gender. The narrator, along with the other males, learns to speak and act like a human from a human trainer. After the completion of their training, the group joins many other animals of multiple species for their final test: a cocktail party. At this party, all the animals mingle and dance with their new human skills.

Following the party, the narrator is brought to a sort of amusement park, "Dreamland", where the animals are assigned various human jobs based on their capabilities. The narrator gradually gains trust from the higher-ranked humans, eventually obtaining a position training animals himself. He gains enough trust from his supervisors to earn a badge showing his rank as fully human, where he is promoted to a management position and a nice apartment. However, the narrator soon begins to notice some suspicious activity among the humans at the park, leading to an impromptu, frenzied investigation of suspicious shipments of animals. This investigation peaks with a devastating fire that destroys the park – the cause of which is unknown. The narrator ends up with a mindless job in the financially devastated city near the park, where he eventually befriends Lucia, the daughter of Dreamland's owner, and comes to live with her. The novel closes with an image of Lucia in front of a sunset.[1]

The Man I Became was originally published in Dutch by Uitgeverij Prometheus as Geschiedenis van een berg during 2013 in both print and e-book format.[8][9] An English translation by David Colmer was released in 2016 by Peirene Press in print and e-book format.[1][10]

Critical reception for The Man I Became has been mostly positive.[4] The novel has received both criticism and praise for its plot style. The Oxford Review described the plot as Verhelst's narrator posing vague questions about the nature of humanity that remain unanswered, which they found both frustrating and fascinating, as well as integral to the story's form.[5] In a review for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard compared the work to Will Self’s Great Apes and James Lever’s Me Cheeta, stating that it "seems at first to be a not-too-sophisticated satire on humanity" but that it was ultimately a "haunting, apocalyptic novella, supremely and deliberately difficult to pin down".[3]

In a review for the original Dutch version, De Volkskrant's Arjan Peters felt that the book was longer than it needed to be as the narrator's mature morality was clear early on and that it felt like a children's book that was stretched out for adult audiences.[11] A reviewer for NRC Handelsblad was also critical, stating that they saw the narrator as too mature for an ape that has only just joined humanity and that this felt like a cliche Verhelst should have avoided.[12]