The Origin of the World

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In 1998, François Bon, a contemporary French writer unknown to English-language readers but with a following in France, wrote an essay called “Sur le «Fausto Coppi» de Pierre Michon”—“On Pierre Michon’s Fausto Coppi.” Initially appearing in issue number five of Scherzo, a high-ideals, low-circulation literary review, the essay quickly became notorious. It was soon reissued by Bon and Michon’s principal publisher, Éditions Verdier, as a limited-edition letterpress chapbook the size of a number 10 envelope and almost as light. Even so, it contained enormous news.

“We know,” Bon’s essay began, “two years ago, there were problems with a distributor, and despite the best efforts of a ‘little’ publisher—‘little’ as in one willing to publish work as excellent as it is challenging — its three hundred copies of Pierre Michon’s Fausto Coppi are still in a storage facility in the boonies.”

Bon’s “we know” was a provocation: we most certainly did not know that publishing jack-puddingry had consigned a new novel by Pierre Michon to the alien corn. This marooning, Bon knew, recalled other miscarriages of French literary-historical justice. “As Une Saison en enfer itself sat in an attic in Belgium,” wrote Bon, “or as Les Chants de Maldoror was, by the printer whose press produced it, held hostage from sale, a book by Pierre Michon — that major figure, that example of a writer who is his complete works—Fausto Coppi, is missing from the whole.”

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