Small Lives

Praise

Already in this first book Mr. Michon’s style is full-grown, a lush mix of realism and impressionism. He favors long, complex sentences (“Proustian” wouldn’t be unfair) that push forward even while constantly stepping sideways, a slow-paced prose that attempts to contain life’s larger gestures and its minute sensations at once. — Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal

Michon’s prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception. —Roger Shattuck

In the flow of Michon’s meditations and narratives, the visionary becomes the actual, and the actual becomes the visionary. —Leonard Michaels

One of the best-kept secrets of modern French prose. —Publishers Weekly

An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative. —Guy Davenport

Rarely have I encountered a writer whose work felt so rewarding upon a first reading. . . . Reading Small Lives, I felt profoundly that Michon was carrying on the mark of a true writer: one who speaks in his own voice while conveying with all its immediacy and flesh-and-blood possiblity of what it means to be human. —Richard Kalich, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

In Small Lives by French author Pierre Michon, not only are we aware that we are reading great literature, but we have the privilege to accompany him on this journey in which he discovers the voice and style that make this an outstanding work of depth, substance and originality. —Monica Carter, Three Percent

The emotion, the forceful claims of the imagery, the painting of the starry night: Mr. Michon achieves what other writers wouldn’t try, licensed as he is by keen regret and transfigured loss. More than other writers, Mr. Michon misses the poetry of the past, and in missing it he possesses it. —Benjamin Lytal