The chronology does not plead in its favor. Emmanuel Macron has lunch in head-to-head with the writer Pierre Michon and called “same time,” the comedian Jean-Marie Bigard. Each time, he comes to speak of France. In the first case, by 2018, Emmanuel Macron gave an idea of how it sees itself ; in the second case, in 2020, Emmanuel Macron gives an idea of how he sees the people. We would like to tell him that the “people” is found in Pierre Michon and the “people” at the home of Jean-Marie Bigard. One is not the other. The one is the opposite of the other. In Lives tiny, the author of the Body of the king gives all its nobility to the lives insignificant and silent. It does this with hardness, in the language of prince.
Read our interview with Pierre Michon : “The obsession of writing has ruined my life”
This is an autobiography fictionalized. Pierre Michon was born in 1945, in the Creuse. In Lives tiny, he tells the story, through a double, how a writer is born in the great day, how a library is, how it is shaped by the destiny of others, how the lives are simple still lives to complex, how literature and geography merge into a singular style, how it pays homage to its ancestors in their truth. The writer gives to see, to feel, to love eight characters transparent. They belong to the rural world in the Limousin. André Dufourneau is an orphan farm boy, a party between the two wars, became can-to be rich and without doubt death to the colonies. Antoine Peluchet is an ancestor fleeing to find gold in California or end up in the bagne of Rochefort. Eugene and Clara are the paternal grandparents, frightened by the disappearance of the son. The brothers Bakroot, Rémi cadet, and Roland the elder, are high school classmates as two faces of the same personality. George Bandy is the chaplain of an asylum, became an alcoholic. Claudette is the lover, who believes in the talent of the writer of the narrator. The little sister, born in 1941, died in infancy.
He drew the world for the better we will pass it on
The father Foucault is an old illiterate woman met in a hospital. He refuses to go to Paris, because he does not know, and write, and prefers the silence. The language of Pierre Michon’s is lyrical, poetic, mythological, classical. It is steeped in a thousand references. Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Artaud. It is written as it is painted. He drew the world for the better we pass. The narrator spoils on alcohol, drugs and stay with the lunatics. Everything suggests that the tension between the land and the language, the origin and the vocation. The figure of the grandmother, Élise, is central in the childhood of the narrator. Death is everywhere. The father, an alcoholic, has disappeared. Pierre Michon speaks of his own, with nothing to embellish it. A universe where women are household and of the scenes and when men run away and get drunk.
Lives tiny is a first story, written at the age of thirty-seven years. A portrait in hollow of the author and a tribute to the rural world. Everything is hard, unforgiving, harsh. The language takes the breath away, as it is totally immersed. The anecdotal becomes epic. There is legend and myth of all : a peasant orphan becomes the son of a country squire or a local or a son perpetual is going in America. The author gives life to the “little people” with a total absence of demagoguery. The friendship between Roland Bakroot and a professor of latin, the death of the paternal grandparents, the discovery of Arthur Rimbaud by the narrator himself. And so the old man has cancer of the throat being obstinate in not wanting to go to Paris, where he could be cared for lest we discover his illiteracy. The feeling of shame, to reiterate that it is illiterate to each time you must fill out a sheet, being stronger than the desire to live. In a style that is noble, Pierre Michon’s fate the anonymous of their loneliness, of their oblivion. He does nothing, he gives them everything.
Lives lowercase letters, Pierre Michon, Folio, 250 pages, 7.50 euros.
writing will advise you
Pierre Michon : “The obsession of writing has ruined my life “
