THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD
Fiction / Literature & Essay
5½ x 8, 96 pp
Cloth, $18.00
1-56279-126-5
World English

2002 Recipient of the
HEMINGWAY TRANSLATION GRANT

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.”
—Guy Davenport

“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. 

“The Origin of the World ... contains ... magic in the form of a novel brought vividly to life and then left suspended in the suggestiveness of its sometimes subterranean setting. We shall, I am sure, be hearing more from Michon, not only because he has a remarkable and devoted American translator, Wyatt Mason, who confers on the books full citizenship in English, but also because the pressure of imagination that sustains Michon's writing has not flagged. That imagination draws its force in great part from a sense of the past, particularly in the past embedded in the mountains, plateaus, rivers, and caves of the French landscape.”
—Harper's

"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."
—San Francisco Chronicle 

“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.”
—St. Petersburg Times
 
 

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.

MASTERS AND SERVANTS
Fiction
192 pages
Paper, $14.95
1-56279-103-6
World

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.”
— Kirkus Reviews

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.”
— Le Monde

“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.”
— Guy Davenport

“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.”
— Richard Howard

“Demonstrate[s] the independence of voice that marks a true writer.”
— New York Review of Books

"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."
— Harper's

“We learn many kinds of truth from these tales of pure invention and documented fact.... An exemplary translation.”
— Translation Review

“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.”
— Leonard Michaels