Les deux Beune

Thirty-five years after Le Roi du bois and La Grande Beune, Pierre Michon (finally) gives us its sequel. “Readers of Pierre Michon know it well: ‘the king comes when he pleases,’ which is to say, in short, that literature — inspiration, grace, call it what you will — arrives in its own time […]. Over the decades, Pierre Michon had expressed his hope of writing a sequel to La Grande Beune (Verdier, 1996), that astonishing novel of desire, and doubtless his own favorite among his books. Since the king truly comes when he wishes, La Petite Beune arrived some three decades after the Grande.”

The two books converge, forming a confluence for this river that flows through the heart of a village in the Périgord, land of prehistoric caves. “And what strikes one immediately is a kind of miracle: although so many years have passed, he manages at once to revive the almost hallucinatory erotic tension that carries the first text.” (Raphaëlle Leyris, Le Monde, 23 March 2023).