One of the undisputed classics of contemporary letters.
Walter Benjamin said that every great work creates a genre or ends it: these Tiny Lives seem to fulfill both movements in one. Through his eight chapters, Michon embodies the figure of the biographed biographer, constructing an autobiography based on the reconstruction of the lives of others: tiny lives of his grandparents, his classmates at a boarding school in the French province; of that orphaned boy who, like a "failed Rimbaud", goes to Africa in search of a chimerical fortune.
A wise and unrepeatable mix of genres that creates a new genre, the discerning reader will appreciate how an entire area of today's French literature comes out of this small volume: the way in which Michon mixes exact doses of Flaubert, Rimbaud, Faulkner, Proust and Jean Genet to find a new tone, tender and dry at the same time, an extrem...read more