The French writer Pierre Michon will receive today in Santa Margherita di Belice (Agrigento), during a gala eveningthe “Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa” award, which this year reached its nineteenth edition. Michon, 79 years old, was awarded for his extraordinary debut book, “Vite minuscole”, published by Adelphi in 1984, still considered today a masterpiece of contemporary French literature.
“Michon is one of the greatest European writers,” declared Salvatore Silvano Nigro, president of the award committee. “His books are translated all over the world, and his writing is one of the most surprising in European literature. We are talking about an inventor of writing, we are at the level of Proust. In his books Michon builds fantastic worlds, in which readers often identify, discovering that they have frequented them even without having been fully aware of it.”
“Vite minuscole” – republished last year by Adelphi (translated by Leopoldo Carra) – came out in France in 1984. It was the first book by a writer who was still unknown in the literary world, but it was immediately clear that it was a dazzling debut. And bold: recovering a tradition that dates back to Plutarch, Suetonius, and Christian hagiography, Michon tells the lives of ten characters who are not illustrious or exemplary, but, precisely, “minuscule” and therefore destined to oblivion if a sumptuous language of unusual and dazzling beauty did not intervene to redeem them, capable of “transforming dead flesh into text and defeat into gold”. Lives like that of his ancestor Alain Dufourneau, the orphan who wants to “make the leap into color and violence” in Africa, convinced that only there does a peasant become a White and, even if he were “the last of the ill-born, deformed and repudiated children of the mother tongue”, can feel closer to his skirt than a Black; or like that, lacerating, of Eugène and Clara, the paternal grandparents, nailed to the role of “go-between for an absent god” – the father, the “one-eyed commander”, who has set sail and has since then marked the life of his son like the crutch of Long John Silver, in Treasure Island, “runs the deck of a schooner full of subterfuge”; or like that of the brothers Roland and Rémi Bakroot, the boarding school companions, the first grimly sunk in the remote past of books, the second in the invincible present, and united by an obstinate rage no less than by a mad love. Each of these characters has in some way plotted his own destiny.
