La Grande Beune
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Bernard, en très amical hommage, Pierre Michon.”
La Grande Beune has its origins in L’Origine du monde, published in three chapters across three issues of the Nouvelle Revue française, from May to July 1988. Two further chapters followed in 1993, from Théodore Balmoral: “a powerful promise of a project so vast and so full that it seemed to keep its author from any publication since Rimbaud, le fils. Readers had long awaited from the author of Vies minuscules a work to which Michon himself would have wished to attach the name grand-oeuvre (…). The yellow cover of Éditions Verdier finally delivered the text, life-size… L’Origine du monde, in this version, had become La Grande Beune. At first glance, one might be tempted to throw in the towel before this dish worthy of nouvelle cuisine. But one need only lift the cover for the aroma to fill the room at once. One need only immerse oneself in the some ninety pages of La Grande Beune to understand that this is one of the greatest books it has been given us to read in recent years” (Thierry Guichard, in Le Matricule des anges, no. 15, February 1996). Indeed: this novella of fewer than eighty pages is a truly dazzling text, born of the dazzling apparition of a woman, echoing the narrator’s emotion in Le Roi du bois, published alongside it.