La Grande Beune

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, published by Théodore Balmoral: “a powerful promise of a project so vast and so full that it seemed to have kept its author from any publication since Rimbaud, le fils. For a long time, readers had awaited from the author of Vies minuscules a work to which Michon himself might have attached the name grand-oeuvre (…) The yellow cover of Éditions Verdier finally delivered the text, slender in size… L’Origine du monde, in this version, became 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 to read in recent years” (Thierry Guichard, in Le Matricule des Anges, no. 15, February 1996). Indeed: this short novel is a truly dazzling text, born of the blinding apparition of a woman, echoing the narrator’s emotion in Le Roi du bois, published alongside it.