Pierre Michon est un très grand écrivain, vivant. Vies minuscules expose les portraits de huit anonymes qu'il a fréquentés, et de sa mère, et de toutes les femmes qui l'ont empêché de se noyer dans l'obscure lagune de la réminiscence de son impouvoir. Ce sont autant de reflets de Michon lui-même. Ils portent une imprécation asymptotique, incrédule, vexatoire et pourtant salvatrice, dans le grand balancement d'une parole en attente précaire, à l'humour cautérisant. On trouve des mots tranchants, oeuvre d'un équarrisseur de pauvres carnes désorientées, lui-même "interloqué comme un stylite au pied d'un mat de cocagne", (p. 163). Michon se resitue en perdition dans les états intermédiaires sans feu ni lieu, dans ce "Bardo sous la dent et la griffe de déesses brouteuses de crânes", (p. 147). En sourdent une "fulgurance railleuse de l'antiphrase", (p. 199), de cuisantes homélies paroxystiques éviscérées de l'en-dedans de l'absence paternelle, qui convoient en sonorités inopinées, burlesques et télescopiques les dodelinantes excavations sacrificielles et divinatoires d'entrailles embruinées au tord-boyaux et aux amphétamines. Les traits de Michon sont creusés du silence du père qui reçoit une injonction de se manifester : "Les mots claquent comme des fouets, sommant le monde de se rendre au Verbe", p. 182, ou comme des machettes abattant la forêt primordiale aux profondes racines, agitées au dessus de la tête par un "pur bloc de colère mouvante, jaculatoire, comme on imagine que se manifestaient les dieux aztèques au mieux de leur forme ; comme eux, il suspendait un instant son regard fulminant sur un monde à détruire ; puis tournait les talons et disparaissait, comme eux plein de massacres et de sanglots, écorché mais terreux, marchant comme une hache abat un arbre.", p. 179. "Au Jugement dernier, [...], me levant rajeuni, [...] , je saurai comment de mon vivant j'aurais dû écrire pour qu'à travers l'emphase qu'en vain je déploie, un peu de vrai vienne au jour.", p. 244.
Michon is much better when he writes about others rather than himself. The chapters here about wandering family members and friends from school are filled with wonder and depth and mystery, investing memory with an exploratory expansiveness that resonated down to the obscurest cells of my grey matter; but the chapters that deal with himself and his struggling attempts to write, and his drug use and his relations with women, felt unnecessarily excessive and surcharged with intentional self-mythologizing. It was useful for me as a reader of Michon to know the facts (or a distorted version of them) of his dissolute behavior, as it seriously alters my impression of him as a borderline academic, so I welcome the knowledge that he once was a sloppy womanizing pill popper, and respect it, but his accounts of this period of his life are too confessional and egomaniacal (however brave) and bloated with self-importance. I could not even finish the longest chapter that deals with this, as the thought of continuing to read when I woke up this morning turned my stomach. Sweaty self-lacerating confessional bravado makes me a little sick.
Do You like book Small Lives (2008)?
Michon is a magnificent prose stylist and his instrument works best when he is writing the lives of others. When writing about himself and his drug-taking, betrayals, and so on, it does not work so well, partly because the language surreptitiously glorifies with its music what he pretends to deplore. So I find some hypocrisy in his self-portrayal ("You women all left me because I behaved so badly, but see, I have become a great writer nonetheless, and you with all your pitiful virtues are now a footnote in my autobiography.") Too bad. Character really does interfere with artistry, and he should know better.
—Wendy
I'm pretty sure I missed about half of this book in my first reading - it's written in highly literary French, and at some point it's going to require a reading with a dictionary in my other hand (which is not the way I prefer to read a book, but this one is probably worth understanding). The premise is intriguing: it's an autobiography, more or less, but written in the form of short stories beginning with more-fiction-than-not accounts of relatives about whom little to nothing is known and eventually converging on the life of the author himself. It's not cheerful, but it's well-written and well-structured.
—Hallie
Those haunted by the small people in one's personal past who have perished and only continue to exist in one's own soon-to-perish memory will find this a rewarding read. But beware. Michon, who was not a child of privilege and struggled to achieve his impressive cultural knowledge, experiences the world through the lens of literature and painting. Consequently, his writing is breathtakingly, sometimes maddeningly, inter-textual and sends one running to the internet on virtually every page to trace down some work of art or poetry. Moreover, like his hero Rimbaud, and so many other French writers, he portrays himself as belonging to the category of the "cursed poet," which leads to some painful pages and to the inevitable question as to how authentic the self-portrayal actually is. Alcoholism, drugs, madness, ill-treatment of women--it is all a part of the past of the narrator named "Pierre Michon." Some of Michon's small lives are more compelling than others. I especially recommend "The Life of André Dufourneau," "The Life of Antoine Peluchet," "The Life of the Bakroot Brothers" and, most of all, "The Life of Father Foucault." Who can ever forget the last of these, a man who chooses to die of throat cancer in a provincial hospital rather than go for treatment to Paris, where the fact that he is illiterate will just be too heavy a burden to bear. Gee, being surrounded by a group of Parisians who instantly get ALL of Michon's cultural references would be too much for this semi-literate reviewer to bear as well, although I would suffer through that if throat cancer were the alternative! Finally, despite my general enthusiasm for this very attractive volume, the translation is sometimes not as clear as the original, and in a few quite critical places it is just plain incorrect.
—Stephen Durrant
