Petites vies des grands hommes by Lætitia Bianchi
Malraux eating cauliflower stalks in 1937 in Barcelona, Hemingway treated as a “capitalist bourgeoisist pig” by a Polish mechanic he provoked in a duel, Liszt smoking the cigar in his Vatican apartment … Small, the lives of these great men told number after number in a column in Le Tigre. The little things of life remain, the absurd, the stripped-down man. All this tightened, compressed – because small, these lives are also compressed by the format and the rhythm at the course. Lætitia Bianchi cuts, amputated, waist of joy in the existences pleases to the excess, keeps what no biographer or dictionary would have kept. The scrolling life is expressed with the tasty details it remains, interrupted only in the last line by the death that survives always, only certainty.
