tomwootton's review
5.0
excellent set of extremely short stories covering the engagement of christianity with pagan Ireland, availability of grace in the material world, religious communities and the transmission of knowledge through history in the French Causses, and religious communities in the Vendée.
Highly elliptical, mystical, and cynical. desire and violence are always present. michon creates beauty and mystery through precision.
translation by Ann Jefferson comes highly recommended:
"There is, however, excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. Ann Jefferson, a former professor of French at Oxford, has delivered Michon’s two books of short stories, Mythologies d’hiver (1997) and Abbés (2002), in a single slim volume. I read Jefferson’s versions in something close to shock: they feel as Michon feels in French. There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/pierre-michon-violence-creativity/
Highly elliptical, mystical, and cynical. desire and violence are always present. michon creates beauty and mystery through precision.
translation by Ann Jefferson comes highly recommended:
"There is, however, excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. Ann Jefferson, a former professor of French at Oxford, has delivered Michon’s two books of short stories, Mythologies d’hiver (1997) and Abbés (2002), in a single slim volume. I read Jefferson’s versions in something close to shock: they feel as Michon feels in French. There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/pierre-michon-violence-creativity/
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