Jean-Pierre Milovanoff is a contemporary French novelist, dramatist and poet whose elegant writing may have eluded - for an unfathomable reason - editorial plans of English language publishers.
At least for now, and hopefully not for long
as Milovanoff’s fiction, which has garnered numerous French literary prizes, stands
out in a mantle of its own in the star-studded gallery
of contemporary French novelists such as Muriel Barbery, Nicolas Fargues, Annie Erneaux and David Foenkinos.
Born in 1940 in Nîmes,
France, Jean-Pierre Milovanoff is a prodigious writer, at
home in most literary genres, including children’s books; he was also a radio
producer for France Culture.
Milovanoffʻs most recent novel ″The Winter of
a Selfish Man and the Spring That Followed″ (LʻHiver dʻun égoïste et le printemps qui suivit - Grasset, 2012) evidences
several of the author’s strengths as a novelist: characters who, similar to old
china, are chipped at the edges; short and well-tempered chapters and the
precise delineation of a contained geography, inspired - possibly - by the counties in
which the author grew up.
Misha Miriaki, the protagonist of the novel, is a Frenchman who returns to his natal Languedoc
after having spent several years in Japan. His first person narrative, both sombre
and hilarious, carries us through the story, glittering with subdued irony.
One might readily agree
that the tour de force of ″The Winter
of a Selfish Man and the Spring That Followed″ is the layered and haunting
description of Montpellier’s surroundings:
″We arrived within
sight of the lighthouse at Bélugue which had gone out of service in the 1960s.
The wind had pushed enormous quantities of sand against its base.
More dunes had built up further out in the distance.
The carcass of a seagull bore witness to a fight lost to a hungry predator, a half wild cat or a fox. The winner had left behind only a ball of feathers, the ergots and the yellow beak.
The wind had pushed enormous quantities of sand against its base.
More dunes had built up further out in the distance.
The carcass of a seagull bore witness to a fight lost to a hungry predator, a half wild cat or a fox. The winner had left behind only a ball of feathers, the ergots and the yellow beak.
We turned around and
returned to the city following the shoreline.″
To top it all off, the last page in the novel is a poem, whose final stanza might be translated as follows:
″The night falls on us, inescapable.
To top it all off, the last page in the novel is a poem, whose final stanza might be translated as follows:
″The night falls on us, inescapable.
The sun is an ox in
its stable.
Our childish hands
seek each other out under the starry table
Where death pours
out grains of sand and gravel. ″
(Cover Page Credit:
with my thanks).
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