Except for the usual first book problems (we get it, you're an artist, you've suffered, you've made others suffer, go ahead, express it all), this is outstanding. I have no way to describe why Michon is so much more interesting than so many people writing today, but he is. Density, I think, if that helps. ( )

This book has won prizes, the English translation won a big prize, Small Lives is well-known in France, it's worth three dozen Martin Amis's, yet it seems to be little-known here.

Small Lives is about eight people living in deeply rural France. There are feuds, disappearances, disappointments. A man's refusal to reveal his illiteracy leads to his death. A priest conducts services in an empty church. Happenings and doings and people about which the outside world knows nothing, cares nothing, but that are the world in these small lives. What Graham Robb has to say about peasant life in The Discovery of France is brought to life here, but most of the events and interactions in the book would not seem unfamiliar to inhabitants of any rural area that's kept many of its old ways.

Small Lives is beautifully written. The people seem real (well, they are to a degree) and the places, both landscape and interiors, are evocative and exquisitely drawn. Michon is able to alter his style and tone seamlessly and appropriately and he always draws the reader along with him.

Because the book is apparently highly autobiographical, some of the lives are of those of Michon's family. It's natural that we should get to know the narrator/Michon, just as it's natural that in so small a settlement each person has a strong connection with the others. Gradually it's he who becomes the main character in the book, and that's the only quibble I have. The change in focus is smooth, the literary and personal reasons for the change are easy to understand, but I would rather have learned more about Father Bandy than Michon's broken love affair, more about Claudette than Michon's addiction, more about the field gone back to the wild than Michon's dead sister. Although the writer's life has been eventful and turbulent and the lives of his other subjects were so only in quiet ways Michon is more interesting when delineating other peoples's small lives.rather than his own.

une écriture de braise ( )