Small Lives - by Pierre Michon (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Pierre Michon's Lives Under Glass was called "his chef-d'oeuvre" by Le Monde.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><i>Small Lives</i> (<i>Vies minuscules</i>), Pierre Michon's first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis. <i>Le Monde</i> calls it his chef d'oeuvre. A bolt of lightening. In <i>Small Lives</i>, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>Already in this first book Mr. Michon's style is full-grown, a lush mix of realism and impressionism. He favors long, complex sentences (Proustian wouldn't be unfair) that push forward even while constantly stepping sideways, a slow-paced prose that attempts to contain life's larger gestures and its minute sensations at once. <b>-- Martin Riker, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b> <p/>Michon's prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud's assaults on conventional perception. <b>--Roger Shattuck <br></b><br>In the flow of Michon's meditations and narratives, the visionary becomes the actual, and the actual becomes the visionary. <b>--Leonard Michaels <br></b><br>One of the best-kept secrets of modern French prose. <b><i>--Publishers Weekly <br></i></b><br>An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative. <b>--Guy Davenport <br></b><br>Rarely have I encountered a writer whose work felt so rewarding upon a first reading. . . . Reading Small Lives, I felt profoundly that Michon was carrying on the mark of a true writer: one who speaks in his own voice while conveying with all its immediacy and flesh-and-blood possiblity of what it means to be human. <b>--Richard Kalich, <i>The Review of Contemporary Fiction </i></b> <p/>In Small Lives by French author Pierre Michon, not only are we aware that we are reading great literature, but we have the privilege to accompany him on this journey in which he discovers the voice and style that make this an outstanding work of depth, substance and originality. <b>--Monica Carter, <i>Three Percent <br></i></b><br>The emotion, the forceful claims of the imagery, the painting of the starry night: Mr. Michon achieves what other writers wouldn't try, licensed as he is by keen regret and transfigured loss. More than other writers, Mr. Michon misses the poetry of the past, and in missing it he possesses it. <b>--Benjamin Lytal</b><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Pierre Michon, born in Cards, France, in 1945, is one of France's foremost contemporary writers. He was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman for <i>The Eleven</i> (2009), the Prix Décembre for his short novels <i>Abbés</i> and <i>Corps du roi</i>, the Prix Louis Guilloux for <i>La grande beaune</i> (<i>The Origin of the World</i>), and the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1996 for his body of work. <p/>Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. Her most recent collection of poetry is <i>Rooms and Their Airs</i>. She has translated over twenty books from French, including <i>The Serpent of Stars</i> by Jean Giono. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont Collegeof fine Arts, and lives in Vermont. <p/>After devoting a part of her life to specialized horticulture, Elizabeth Deshays, now works as a teacher and translator. She is the author of a study on bilingual education, L'Enfant Bilingue. In addition to Michon's novels, she translated Julien Gracq's <i>La Presqu'ile</i> (<i>The Peninsula</i>). She lives in Provence.
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