Winter Mythologies and Abbots

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Pierre Michon was born in 1945. He made his name with his first published work, Vies minuscules (Small Lives), which appeared in 1984, when he was thirty-nine. He is one of the finest and most admired French writers of today, and he has received recognition in the form of the Prix Décembre for Abbots and Corps du roi (The King’s Body; a collection of short literary essays) in 2002, and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française for his novel Les Onze (The Eleven) in 2009. Another novel is in preparation, and he lives in Nantes.

Small Lives may have represented a late start for Michon, but it provided him with a theme on which a number of fruitful variations were to follow. Michon’s preferred subjects are small in the sense of “obscure” or “apparently insignificant,” and his preferred form is small in the sense of “short.” Small Lives tells the stories of eight figures from Michon’s own background in Creuse, part of the relatively poor and rural Limousin region, who positively or negatively shaped the vocation which, when finally realized, enabled him to restore them to life through his writing. The figures who populate Winter Mythologies and Abbots are for the most part equally obscure, though historically more distant: minor saints and little-known monks from the early Middle Ages in the French and Irish provinces. The brevity of the texts in which they appear gives readers the sense of merely glimpsing critical moments in these unfamiliar lives which often include or anticipate their end.

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