| PIERRE
MICHON Wyatt Mason, translator
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THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD MASTERS AND SERVANTS |
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THE
ORIGIN OF THE WORLD |
THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD
2002 Recipient of the
A twenty-year-old
takes his first teaching job in a sleepy French town. There, he falls under
the spell of one of the town’s residents, an older woman of transcendant
beauty. During a season of rainy days and sleepless nights, the young teacher
learns first hand about the most ancient of urges and the most brutal of
realities. The Origin of the World is a devastating exploration of
the destructive powers of passion, and the consuming need for love.
“An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.” “A slender book in length, but not in style and language....
Michon's short fable obliges us to recognize, within and beyond sexual
fantasy, strains of cruelty directed toward beauty. "Lust is a common theme in literature, but rarely has it been expressed
as poetically and profoundly as it is in prize-winning French author Pierre
Michon's sliver of a novel, The Origin of the World. Told in the
voice of a 20-year-old grammar school teacher in a small French town in
the Dordogne, it reveals the instructor's obsession with the single mother
behind the counter at the local tabac. "[M]y desires were called Yvonne
and they sold me Marlboros." “The Origin of the World is a romance that recreates in its rushing,
unchecked prose the swirling delirium of love and longing ... Pierre Michon
writes beautifully of the mysteries of desire. This slender novel shows
Michon as a poet of love, and should bring him a wider audience in this.” |
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Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France aux Etas-Unis. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. |
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MASTERS
AND SERVANTS
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MASTERS AND SERVANTS
FINALIST, 1997 FRENCH-AMERICAN TRANSLATION AWARD
“Michon
offers a brilliant tour de force of five pieces about art and artists: an
often indescribably eloquent modern taking up where Vasari, say, might have
left off.... Stylistically demanding, but a book often as passionate, beautiful,
and skilled as the paintings it springs from.” With his debut into English, Masters and Servants, captures the
intimate and intricate detailwork of five artists' lives through exquisitely
crafted fiction. The Arles postmaster Roulin reveals Van Gogh's yellow
countryside. Spanish women haunt the corners of Goya's Madrid, singsonging
his eccentricities. Watteau's secret erotic portraiture captivates a parish
priest. Lorentino, an obsure disciple of Piero della Francesca, daydreams
of his master while bartering one of his finest paintings for a pig. A
stranger spies on Claude Lorrain, becoming mesmerized by the painter's
relationship to his landscape, slowly hypnotized by the beauty of the
woodlands, as is Lorrain's brush.
“Do not miss this little masterpiece.” “Reading 'The Life of Joseph Roulin' made tears well up at the end.
A beautiful novella with an ancestry somewhere between Guy de Maupassant
and Flaubert, and yet a wholly new kind of treatment.” “Michon is new to me but beginning with with Masters and Servants
he has become a member of that family known as the authors I admire, I
trust, I want to read.” “Demonstrate[s] the independence of voice that marks a true writer.” "One can find Michon's finest work in the five semi-legendary stories
about painters published in English as Masters and Servants. These
oblique treatments of Watteau, Goya, Van Gogh, and others radiate a true
magic." “We learn many kinds of truth from these tales of pure invention and
documented fact.... An exemplary translation.” “From the silence of paintings Pierre Michon evokes marvels. A portrait
becomes a person of such complex depth as to suggest the mentality of
an era. A color becomes an idea. A painting becomes the painter, and words
beome painting. Most generally, in the flow of Michon's meditations and
narratives, the visionary becomes the actual, and the actual becomes the
visionary. These are critical moments to which such names as van Gogh
or Goya are attached, names that suggest the poignancy and pathos of art
amid the beauty and incoherence and destructive nightmare of life. Wyatt
Alexander Mason's translation is excellent in its energy and precision.”
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PIERRE MICHON, “one of the best-kept secrets of modern French prose” (Publishers Weekly), is an author of high acclaim in France and Europe. He was winner in 1984 of the Prix France Culture for his first novel Vies minuscules, the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1996 for his body of work, and the Prix Louis Guilloux in June 1997 for La Grande Beune. His novels and stories have been translated into German, Dutch, and Italian. He lives in France, where his ninth book will be published this fall. | ||
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WYATT ALEXANDER MASON’s most recent translation, Rimbaud Complete,
was published in March 2002 by The Modern Library. He is currently at work
on two new translations: the complete correspondence of Arthur Rimbaud (Counterpoint)
and Dante’s La Vita Nuova (Modern Library). Also a critic and illustrator,
Mr. Mason lives in New York City.
For an online interviews with Wyatt Mason, see the Random House web site and a streaming audio broadcast of with Mason's at wbur.org.
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—Guy Davenport