La Grande Beune

by Pierre Michon

Quand il arrive à Castelnau, un village au fin fond de la Dordogne, tout près de Lascaux, le narrateur a vingt ans. C'est son premier poste. Derrière le rideau gris des pluies de septembre, entre deux dictées, le jeune instituteur s'abandonne aux rêves les plus violents - archaïques, secrets et troubles comme les flots que roule, en contrebas des maisons, la Grande Beune. Dans ces contrées où se rejoue encore dans une forme ancienne l'origine du monde, le sexe sépare deux univers. Celui des hommes, prédateurs, frustes mais rusés - terriblement. Et puis celui des femmes, autour de deux figures que l'écrivain campe magistralement. Hélène l'aubergiste, mère emblématique, et Yvonne, à la beauté royale, qui suscite chez le narrateur une convoitise brûlante et toutes les variations d'un émoi qu'il nous fait partager au rythme de sa phrase : emportée comme un galop de rennes dans une ère révolue, retournée en une scène grotesque où des enfants exhibent l'animal vaincu, mordante ou fuyante comme le loup des peintures rupestres.

Genres: France, Fiction, French Literature, Novels, Literature, Short Stories, 20th Century

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Pierre Michon’s writing has received great acclaim in his native France; his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He was winner of the Prix France Culture in 1984 for his first book, Small Lives, the 1996 Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work, and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française. His works include Masters and Sons, The Origin of the World, and Rimbaud's Son.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

"Her royal face was as bare as a belly: and within this face, beneath raven hair were such pale eyes, eyes forever the miraculous preserve of the fair, a secret light beneath darkness that if by some miracle you might have such a woman would nonetheless remain an enigma that nothing, neither lifted dresses nor heightened voices, can ever lay bare."

Pierre Michon is among the masters of contemporary French literature. Reading The Origin of the World, any reader will certainly see why. His highly poetic, lyrical prose is breathtaking – nearly every single sentence is a literary jewel worthy of several rereads. The above quote is but one example.

A personal confession, if I may: I find writing a review for a book of poetry exceedingly difficult since poems are all about the exactitude and flow of specific words. Thus, I'm reluctant to transcribe the poet's language or reduce the poet's precise expression into general observations on such elements as theme, shape or mood. I have similar feelings with The Origin of the World, a short novel written in intimate first-person where the protagonist is a randy twenty-year-old elementary school teacher recently arrived in a small village along a river in southern France.

Our passionate, sexually charged narrator has both the eyes of a painter (say, Degas or Renoir) and the heart of a poet, perhaps even the heart of Arthur Rimbaud (Pierre Michon authored a book about the French poet in the years prior to writing The Origin). Here's a snippet of the narrator's first encounter with the alluring lady behind the counter at the local newspaper and tobacco shop who will instantly become the object of his obsessive desire: "This woman, her lips lightly parted, benevolent and mildly surprised, patiently considered my silence. She was waiting to hear what I wanted. I spoke in a dream, in a voice nonetheless clear. She turned around, her armpit appearing when she lifted her arm to the shelves, and her hand, smooth and beringed, opened under my eyes with a red-and-white box of Marlboros in its palm. I brushed it while taking the box. Perhaps to see this gesture again - the coins resting in her palm, painted nails joining and separating - I also bought the postcard of the arrowed saint. She smiled, broadly."

One especial feature of this Pierre Michon tale continues to haunt long after the book is put down: the juxtaposition of nature's lightness and brutality. " There wasn't a breath of wind along the edge of the woods. She was in her Sunday best, in one of those ample brown car coasts that one imagines draped from the shoulders of haughty young ladies from the turn of the century who, with a little finger raised skyward and a cherry red mouth, look through a lorgnette at jockeys weighing in; underneath she wore pearls that despite winter she left bare at her neck; earrings, as always, and fine icy stockings beneath which a tormented whiteness had begun to blush pink in the cold. All this chic at the edge of a lost wood was as out of place as a pornographic doodle on a jockey's pristine shirt. I tried in vain to catch my breath, what cut it short now came from below, sharp as a razor. I believe that she had run as well, her heavy breaths sweeping through her throat, her car coat, her pearls; the scene shook; moreover, the frost revealed these brief breaths, spoke of her willingness or her upset. The cold had slapped her in the face, her lips were raw, chafed, but lipstick covered the gash."

Pierre Michon's first novel, Small Lives, was published in 1984 when he was nearing his fortieth year. I sense it took some time for the French author to find his voice as a novelist; after all, his language possess such a distinctive elegance and grace. I also sense Pierre Michon devoted enormous chunks of time over the course of several years in composing his 1996 The Origin of the World, a sparse novel (even with large font the book is less than 80 pages) but a novel of intense power - the image I keep returning to is a wild horse (the cover of the English paperback edition).

Again, I have always had difficulty writing a review for a book of poetry - and the same holds true for The Origin of the World. I'll simply conclude with two words: highly recommended.


French novelist Pierre Michon, born 1945

"Everything about her screamed desire, something that people say enough that's it's almost meaningless, but it was a quality that she gave of generously to everyone, to herself, to nothing, when she was alone and had forgotten herself, setting something in motion while settling a fingertip to the counter, turning her head slightly, gold earrings brushing her cheek while she watched you or watched nothing at all: this desire was open, like a wound: and she knew it, wore it with valor, with passion. But what are words?" - Pierre Michon, The Origin of the World

[PaperBird]

What happens when you break through that encrusted layer of embellishments, all the flowery language that is drunk on itself, the texture of words tossing you around like a toy, making you unstable and nauseous and wordsick, you try hard to pick out the plot as something to hold onto, but once you break through, you see instead some kind of sea creature underneath that is completely comfortable with his own horrific nature, announces it to the underworld like a black ink that surrounds you, it's hard to escape from, because you have been seduced and brought under, this is where he can do some damage because at that point it's too late, you're already so far into it, it's hard to reverse your way out, now you're dancing with what appears like the devil, and you have to admit that you admire the skill, this dark dance with a holy ghost…

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/swyOvF3Oqqc

[Cesare Cantelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rosicare dietro una scopata mancata

[Algernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is no such thing as prose. There is only verse with differing degrees of rhythm.”

My first experience of the prose of Pierre Michon is a fine example of the literary current that claims less is more , mentioned earlier this year ironically in the excessively long postmodernist extravaganza of John Barth’s tidewater tales. Michon needs less than 100 pages to get his point across, and he does it with a style and subtlety that proves another great modern writer right:
The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! declares Jorge Luis Borges in an introduction to his short prose volume Ficciones.

Before starting our journey back to the origins of the world, I will drop one last author’s name whose style is uncannily similar, who crossed the Atlantic ocean in order to fall under the spell of the French landscape and culture: James Salter. His compact novel A Sport and a Pastime has a similar dreamy, erotic, symbolic structure to Michon.

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I should have used the original artwork that inspired the novel, the one painted in 1866 by Gustave Courbet, but I was afraid that Goodreads censors will be as strict as the Parisian ones with the explicit material. [Curious readers will find L’origin du monde easily on wikipedia, though]
This alternate view from the Paleolithic entrance to the grottes of Lascaux should serve as well, coupled with the Andrei Platonov quote Pierre Michon has chosen as an introduction to his novel:

“The Earth slept naked and tormented like a mother whose bedcovers have slipped away.”

A young intellectual is posted to the small village of Castelnau on the Beune in the year 1961. At the heart of the Perigord region lies the famous Lascaux cave, where prehistoric people first made art on the hidden limestone ceilings of karstic erosions.

Men descended into the caves and made paintings. Not all the men: only those with more delicate hands, a more ready and torturous spirit, single hearts that went at night to look for meaning in the puddles of the Beune, and not finding it there gathered at a place of opaque stones and words that have meaning, words and combinations of words and stones that make sense, and out of these combinations, strength;

The young teacher falls under the spell of Yvonne, a woman from the village working in a tobacco shop. She is earth mother, the original goddess and the original sin, a fever of mind and body that takes the narrator out of time into a mythical rainswept landscape where ancient hunting rituals are re-enacted.

I didn’t need to ask what she was doing there: the sky was my answer, to see her beneath it was enough. This road soon became my passion.

Michon’s prose is mesmerizing, almost musical and charged with hidden undercurrents that drive the story slowly, steadily underground, there to search for meaning, like the prehistoric hunters, into the very womb of the earth.

We climbed and descended between crumbled stones, we wormed through the fault, we trampled through sinkholes where stones slept, we couldn’t make sense of anything. We were afraid of bumping our heads. Everything brimmed with water, the pale soaked clay stuck to our soles, the rains of this sodden winter dripped from above, rivering down in a thousand places.

I have visited the Perigord, including the Lascaux experience, right before the Covid restrictions to travel, so the imagery of the novel has the added poignancy of direct experience for me. Nevertheless, the charged poetic rhythms of the novel should be enough to transmit the message of Michon without me going over-analytical about style and metaphor, about the relationship between earth, flesh and passion:

...she had shaken off that finer flesh, that want that throws even the youngest heart toward drama and night, both debases and blesses, felling them to all fours where they lose themselves in pleasure, and still on all fours and barely less frenzied are other times lost in pain, in grief, in misery.

The narrator descends into a dark, humid, secret ‘crack’ in the earth in search of answers, in search of meaning, in search of artistic inspiration. Guided by a monosyllabic, hirsute, uncouth local shepherd [why add the Wallachian adjective, though?] and in the company of a new girlfriend. There, in a less spectacular grotto than Lascaux, they come across:

... the impeccable expanse of white limestone had been unveiled for them alone, creamy, smooth, lightly grained but a grain that all the same they skimmed over with the tips of their fingers, this grainy, milky world, this mondmilch , overflowing with candor, this great drapery, served to them as if on an easel between a fringe of dark quartzite and a bulbous ceiling, dark and secret.

Each reader is invited to paint his or her own answers on these pristine subterranean walls. The world is renewed with each spring rain, with each new couple locked in passionate embrace, in a ritual that has been going on since the origins of the world.

With one great, slow, somewhat theatrical gesture, his hand rising above him, he embraced the space: “As you can see,” he said, “there is nothing here.”

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to track and simultaneously enjoyable. I haven’t had a book challenge me this hard in a while. Only 84 pages and a linear storyline, but all I have left is emotion and disgruntlement. It isn’t easy to read process-wise. Long sentences, choice adjectives, repetitive allusions, undeniably beautiful but holding something away from me, just out of reach. It also isn’t easy to read content-wise, and that’s all I will say about that. I will read more Michon.

[John Darnielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure if a) I didn’t know what to make of this; b) it’s not my thing; or c) I’m against it. If a book provokes an ambivalent response in me it can sometimes indicate that it has reached me at a deeper level than I’m accustomed to, but I’m skeptical about that as far as this book’s concerned. Michon’s narrator is cruel, self-absorbed, and smug; he is certainly very well drawn, given how short the book is, but he’s unpleasant company. Michon’s style — lavish and intense — feels more central to the book than the story.

The supplementary material, the introduction and the afterword, are excellent — informative and illuminating. I have another Michon on the shelf — I’ll get to that soon. But there’s something rote in this narrator’s character that will put me on guard; some similarity to old tough-man notions of the anti-hero which just don’t interest me at all.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young teacher gets a job in a sleepy village. He arrives at night and from his window at the inn can only see darkness where a river is below. He becomes obsessed with a local woman. Strange fishermen populate his inn. His obsession goes unrequited. There is some violence. Yes, the premise, the scene-setting, even most of the execution is thoroughly satisfying, pregnant with atmosphere and primitive deep significance; but the sex didn’t convince me, the sexual obsession. Or maybe it was not what I wanted it to be. I went in expecting a nuanced portrayal of an erotic obsession that was cerebral, that was a torment centered mostly in the head, however ultimately crotch-driven. What it is instead is a rather crude lust, an almost frat boy obsession with conquest. Yes, the guy is only twenty, so this degree of pure lust is understandable at the narrative level, but the execution is by a man, the author, Pierre Michon, who through his convoluted syntax portrays a frat boy lust that could never ascend to such cerebrations. So there’s a disconnect between the text itself and what the text is about. This in a way adds an extra layer of creepiness, since as the young guy engages in crude rape fantasies there is also present, in the convoluted syntax itself, an older man, a pure intellectual, looking on, possibly getting off in some over-straining way; but is this extra layer intended, or is the tortuous syntax intended to “collapse” into the sex theme as a kind of direct embodied representation of it? The writing does throb with a kind of passion, a Faulknerian passion of run-on sentences, but whereas Faulkner’s syntax often doesn’t fit neatly together, becoming ragged and bordering on the illogical, which for me weds it to his illogical emotional themes; Michon’s writing always seems to add up, to be air tight and logical, which distances it from the emotional content. Is there supposed to be this disconnect, and is it supposed to enhance the themes explored by possibly exhibiting the disconnect between anyone’s subconscious urges and their intellect? To answer this would require me to read more Michon and to simply find out more about him and the ticking of his mind and heart and crotch, which I intend to do, but for now I feel this weird disconnect between Michon’s rarefied writing style and the subterranean themes that style depicts. I do not feel this disconnect as he writes about the local peasant fisherman and their mysterious night fishing expeditions, or in his depiction of a descent into the local caves (where prehistoric cave paintings proliferate). I only feel it in his depiction of sexual obsession, and since the entire book pivots on it for now it feels like a major failing, but since it is also the only failing it is possible I will one day answer my questions, rectify the failing in my mind, and I will recognize the book as a kind of dark and tortured masterpiece.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

About three quarters of the way through this very short novel, I was ready to shrug my shoulders and write a three-star, "great writing, but really, do we need another novel about the author's penis?" review. It turns out, this is not that book. 'Spoiler' alert ahead, I guess.

Michon depicts the squalor of lust (particularly male lust) in an extraordinarily intelligent way. The title, of course, refers to the Courbet painting, and to the origins of art in the caves of Lascaux (and other sites around the world). In both cases--lust and art--what you want to see as something pure and lovely is in fact a kind of revolting vandalism, a fact brought out perfectly when the violent, successful lover shows the pathetic, violent-only-in-his-dreams, unsuccessful lover (and his girlfriend!) around an immaculate cave near the painted caves of Lascaux.

We're encouraged to think the story is about a pure, natural desire; in the end, that pure, natural desire is revealed for what it is. Also, the writing is great.

[Tuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

1960’lı yılların başında Fransa’nın ücra bir kasabasına atanan çiçeği burnunda öğretmen, gençliğin ve yalnızlığın da etkisiyle kendisini karışık ve zıt duyguların içinde bulur. Yağmurun romana kattığı karanlık ve kasvetli hava anlatıcının ruh durumunu da etkisi altına alan bir baskı unsuru olur.

Kasabanın yeşilin çeşitli tonlarına büründüğü gür ve sık ormanları öğretmeni içine çeken bir yaban çağrısına, duygularını dışa vurduğu korunaklı bir sığınağa dönüşür. Doğa ve insanlar arasındaki kontrast, tarihsel arka plandaki anlatı ve masallar hikayeye mistik bir boyut kazandırır.

Romanda adı geçen geçmeyen kişilerin dış görünüşleri ile psikolojik durumları arasında kurulan bağlar, durum ve ortam betimlemelerindeki detaycı yaklaşım; hikayedeki mekanları ve karakterleri gözümüzün önüne getirmeyi başarıyor. Bununla birlikte anlatıcının düşünce ve gözlemlerini aktarımındaki kopukluk yer yer hikayenin akışını bozan bir işlev görüyor.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michon's tumbling clauses are always a pleasure.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, of course: beneath these places run rivers, cutting holes through the limestone. Above these holes, reindeer made for summer pastures endlessly, climbing from the Atlantic in spring to the green grass of l’Auvergne surrounded by their thundering hooves, an immense dust cloud on the horizon, their antlers above, and the doleful head of one pushing into the rump of the next; and there, in the dissolute gully that cradles and nurses the Vézère, the two Beunes, and the Auvézère, we waited for them with Dabs, Parrot’s Beaks, and cries; and the lichen eaters heard the drums in the distance, saw the fires as if night and day were watching the smoke, but made for the drums without deviation, stretching out in the narrows beside the water, trembling; they plowed straight ahead; because if the reindeer had been able to conceive of a god or a devil, they would have prayed and pondered, then and there, seasonal and unstoppable, each April burgeoning suddenly everywhere like the horns piercing their brows, unleashed without reason like gods, manifesting in a single body endlessly multiplied and animated'

*

[PatriShaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michon es complicado, brutal e incluso puede parecer algo rebuscado, pero en su visceralidad existe imperturbable y potente esa poética de lo crudo, una ensoñación que nos recuerda la violencia que se ejerce sobre lo bello.
Creo que este pequeño relato es una lectura exigente, así como lo es su prosa. Deja amargor en la boca, pero en las papilas gustativas sigue danzando la miel espesa de la buena escritura, esa que tiene justamente el gusto de nuestros mejores y peores pensamientos.

[Billy O'Callaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This past week, without any particular intent, my reading seems to have taken a decidedly French bias. Modiano, Jerome Ferrari, and now Michon.
I've always had a fascination with the Lascaux cave paintings, and that was a big part of the reason why I picked up this book. I'd never read, or even heard of, Pierre Michon but he took just a few pages to really captivate me, and I ended up staying awake late into the night to finish this very fine short novel.
The magic here is in the narration and the use of language, because the basic plot is fairly straightforward: a young schoolteacher (our narrator) arrives in a small town and quickly becomes obsessed by a local woman, a beautiful, flirtatious shopkeeper. She is married, and mother to one of the narrator's pupils, but she is also carrying on a somewhat masochistic affair with the local Lothario, a farmer who has one of the ancient but lesser-known caves on his land. None of this stops the teacher from craving her, and he even begins to persecute her son at school in the desperate hope that she will challenge him.
Michon writes wonderfully. A comparison to Faulkner has been made, and it's easy to see why, not least because of the long, spooling but always carefully controlled sentences the author crafts but also because of the visceral quality of his evocations with regard to landscape and character. This is a story big on mood, a tale of lust, frustration and obsession, and the parallels between the bestial nature of modern and ancient man are much more subtle than they seem in summary.
I am delighted to see that several of Michon's novels have been translated into English, and am eager now to read more of him.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in an extraordinarily poetic prose this is a story of a young man who comes by bus to a small community to teach in a school that is in a region that has ancient cave paintings. He becomes infatuated with a woman whose son is in his class and fantasizes about making love to her but her interests are in someone else and not him. I really enjoy poetic prose but this was a little over the top and was so lyrical that it was difficult to follow at times but still an excellent read.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ya he hablado de Jorge Semprún y de Pierre Michon, ambos autores gratos a quien esto escribe. Así que, cuando vi que el primero dijo sobre la novela “El origen del mundo”, del segundo: “Con una prosa a la que la madurez ha llevado a la cima de la precisión carnal, de la sensualidad en sus evocaciones tiernas o brutales, Pierre Michon describe un universo de evidencias y de misterios cuyo recuerdo nos perseguirá”, no tuve más remedio que devorar este relato (cosa por lo demás muy sencilla, pues apenas alcanza las ochenta páginas).
La historia de un veinteañero profesor, cuyo primer trabajo se realiza en Castelnau; su enamoramiento de Ivonne, una mujer que atiende un estanco local, así como la descripción de la posadera local, Hélene, puede parecer banal y pueril. Pero la magistral pluma de Michon logra que tan sencilla historia se vuelva mágica, sublimemente avasalladora.
“Un libro delgado en páginas, pero no en estilo ni en lenguaje… La breve fábula de Michon nos obliga a reconocer, en el ámbito de la fantasía sexual, y más allá de él, la crueldad que se ejerce sobre la belleza… El poder de la imaginación que sostiene la escritura de Michon no decae jamás”, afirma Roger Shattuck, de “Harper’s Magazine”.
Una escritura pulcra, acabadísima, cuya poética manipulación de la lujuria y el sexo, el deseo y la carnalidad, nos hacen reconocernos ínfimos, pequeños, mundanos, cuando queremos expresarle a la mujer amada nuestras más recónditas pasiones. Imiten a Michon; les funcionará.

[Giuls (la_fisiolettrice) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Honey, quando scende il sole, quando viene la notte, quando l’anima delle donne è nuda come la loro mano.”

Ma cosa ho appena letto? Questa la domanda appena ho chiuso questo libricino. Denso e scritto magistralmente da un autore poco noto.

Per me leggere non è solo un’esperienza emotiva ma anche un avventura che mi mette alla prova, ecco perché adoro i muri di parole, le riflessioni dense e l’uso magistrale della lingua.

Qui la storia è abbastanza semplice, un maestro, fresco di nomina, arriva in un paesino della Dordogna, il borgo di Castelnau, il paesaggio è un grimorio di simboli che riportano all’origine del mondo, a quegli aspetti primitivi che caratterizzano l’ardore, il selvaggio desiderio che il maestro prova per Yvonne, la callipigia tabaccaia, che abita i suoi pensieri lussuriosi.
Un torrente di istinti, la sazietà trovata solo nei sogni, il fardello dell’incompletezza, tutto scorre nella Grande Beune, fiume - metafora dell’incedere della vita.

Breve ma intenso, si sente che è solo un assaggio di qualcosa di più profondo e ampio che però non è stato completato, infatti è in realtà l’incipit di un romanzo incompiuto, ma vale la pena per la potenza letteraria in grado di trasmettere in appena 70 pagine.

[Santiago González · Rating 1 out of 5]

No sos vos

Me aburrí de punta a punta, no me interesó nada lo que estaba leyendo. En la mitad de la novela entré acá y leí algunas reseñas que hablaban de su genialidad, de cuatro estrellitas para arriba, y de que al principio costaba la lectura pero al final era puro disfrute. Insití. No me pasó.

El estilo de prosa poética me rompe las pelotas, no me gusta andar adivinando qué estoy leyendo porque el autor se regodea en sus frases. No te pido una escritura como la de El Principito pero hacémelo legible. Oraciones larguísimas, capítulos sin punto y aparte, ahí donde Saramago me resultó genial, este me pareció un pelmazo.

Lo iba a dejar por la mitad pero tiene una única virtud: se lee rápido. Letras grandes, 80 páginas. Llegué a él por recomendación de la madre de una amiga, lo leí por cortesía, como para comentarle algo.

Pero debo ser yo el que no entendió algo, no estuvo a la altura o no sabe apreciar la literatura elevada. Ustedes fíjense si les gusta, después de todo es un autor consagradísimo del catálogo de Anagrama.

[Juan Sanabria · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Y lo mismo que yo, alzando la cara entre dos restas, entre dos párrafos, miraba aquella plétora por los cristales de la ventana, detrás de la lluvia que sólo cubre el mundo para que podamos ver en su lugar nuestros sueños, la saciedad de nuestros sueños detrás de esa cortina gris donde todo está permitido."
Es un libro maravilloso, realmente el autor recoge los vacíos que concebimos como necesario en la creción, la aptitud erótica, el pensamiento infalible y descripciones extravagantes con un lenguaje peculiar; simplemente arte.

[Ella Booktrovert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una breve pero intensa historia, narrada con el inigualable estilo de Pierre Michon. Gozosa, honesta, directa. Una historia sobre la imposibilidad de los deseos. Puede que algunos les frustre el final. A mí me parece que así debía ser.

[Donato · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trash trash trash trash trash trash. It's raining trash. Garbage garbage garbage garbage garbage garbage. Rivers of garbage are overflowing. What kind of trash? Trash literature, of which this book is an example. It's not even worth a review, but it gives me a chance to rant a bit, and confirms what I've been thinking about recently: once you've read Kafka, and Beckett and Bernhard (et al), how do you go back to "normal" literature? You can't. Or at least I can't.

What's worse, literature that isn't trying to be literature and is just bad? or literature that tries too hard and fails? In the end, it's the same, they both leave a bad taste in my mouth. I barely remember why I even had this book on my list. I must have read something somewhere, maybe an interview with Michon. Or it was an article by one of his English translators, which if I remember correctly kind of painted him (Michon) as a kind of jerk. Which is OK, I don't care if writers are jerks, but they definitely have to know how to write literature. With Michon, it's like he knows and understands the magic power that literature has, but he doesn't know how to wield it. At least it was short. Short and rotten. This is the exact type of literature a Bernhard character would rant about (as would Bernhard himself I'm sure). Well, Monsieur Michon, you can keep your stuffed foxes, stiletto moons, high-heeled fantasies and faux-profound prose. I'm going back to my Beckett and Bernhard.

[Isaí Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro esencial y sublime que nos materializa el mundo con las luminosas partículas del lenguaje. Obra mínima en su extensión, inmensa en la factura: Michon sumó a sus logros vitales el de haber visto de frente y desnuda a la belleza sin ser tocado por la maldición. Increíble que una novela tan breve contenga al universo entero.

[Ricardo Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

El origen del mundo de Pierre Michón.
El origen de las palabras que quedan atrapadas en un momento. La belleza y el anhelo juegan en una musa que hace que el tiempo se aletargue. Una Venus Calipigia llena de trazos que evocan armonía en las letras. Una obra pequeña que se desenvuelve con gracia y voluptusidad al igual que la silueta del deseo.
Las letras francesas en su máximo esplendor.

[Rafa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Creo que me perdí entre tanta subordinada.

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un joven profesor llega a un pueblo de la Dordoña bajo la incesante lluvia de septiembre. Tierra de cazadores y pescadores donde unas cuevas prehistóricas dan cuenta del origen del mundo. Allí iniciará su primer trabajo y su obsesión por la estanquera. La lujuria, el deseo, la fantasía sexual narrados de una forma bella y profunda. Visceral, sensual. La poética de lo crudo en la prosa exigente del maestro Michon que solo necesita ochenta páginas para lanzarnos al goce de la lectura.

[Γιώργος Τσιόγγας]

Green and grey as vectors of death, pulsing all that is formless, throbbing the moss over the rocks—its pubic path leading to the grotto. You go in—yeah, grotto-grotesque, of course. The endoscope now: it’s all parallels, and the design of it all as dense as a birth canal. It’s a leather belt tightened, strained, then left to coil in itself, charmed and curled meticulously. Then, further into the ochre cavities, you see old Plato’s freshly rotting body. No words. You come closer, over its exposed, sunless glaze. No skin, only the raw flesh laid bare.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«…en los campos célebres no lejos del campamento de Atila, aunque, si se comparaban, el campamento de Atila era una escuela de filosofía, en las llanuras de remolachas y torres de vigilancia en donde Dios y los hombres dejaron de ser de curso legal de una
vez por todas».

[Youssef · Rating 5 out of 5]

L'écriture est d'une justesse vertigineuse. Le style est extraordinaire. Tout est parfait dans ce roman.

Bref, ce texte est magistral!

[Gokce Atac · Rating 2 out of 5]

İngilizcesini okusaydım daha akıcı ve keyifli bir okuma olabilirmiş.

[karina · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s amazing what this book is associating with the ‘origin of the world’ … perfect sentences as always. read on my kindle. #pierremichonworldtour

[Laetitia]

insupportable et dégoûtant