Cluny, Claude Michel 1930–

PERSONAL: Born 1930.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Editions de la Différence, 47 rue de la Villette, Paris 75019, France.

CAREER: Novelist, poet, essayist, and artist.

MEMBER: Académie Mallarmé.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grand Prix de Poésie, French Academy, 1998; Renaudot essat prize, 2002, for L'invention du temps.

WRITINGS:

La balle au bond (novel), Denoël (Paris, France), 1961.

Désordres (poems), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1964.

Un jeune homme de Venise, Denoël (Paris, France), 1966.

(Editor) La poésie française d'humour, des origines à 1970 (poems), 1970.

(With Jean-Paul Morel) Le film du cinéma (motion picture history), Editions Hier et Demain (Paris, France), 1977.

La rage de lir (essays), Denoël (Paris, France), 1978.

Inconnu passager: poèmes 1965–1977, suivi de, Antonio Brocardo à Giorgione (poems), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1978.

Dictionnaire des nouveaux cinémas arabes, Sindbad (Paris, France), 1978.

Vide ta bière dans ta tombe (novel; title means "Finish Your Beer in Your Grave"), Balland (Paris, France), 1980.

L'été jaune, Balland (Paris, France), 1981.

Le livre des quatre Corbeaux (biography), Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1985.

Le Caire (travel book), Diffusion, Presses universitaires de France (Paris, France), 1985.

Asymétries, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1985.

Feuilles d'ombre d'harmodios de Cyrène: apories, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1987.

(With Mouny Berrah and Jacques Lévy) Les cinémas arabes, Cerf, Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris, France), 1987.

Disparition d'Orphée, de Girodet, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1987.

Fagniez, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1988.

Oeuvres de Claude Michel Cluny, two volumes, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1991–1994.

Les dieux parlent: poèmes, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1993.

François Imhoff (criticism), Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1993.

(Editor) Max Jacob, Poémes épars, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1994.

Poèms d'Italie, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 1998.

Atacama: essai sur la guerre du Pacifique, 1879–1883, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 2000.

(With Paul Placet) Augiéras, le peintre (criticism), Editions de la Différence, 2001.

L'invention du temps, Volume 1: Le silence de Delphes: journal littéraire, 1948–1962, Volume 2: Années de sable: journal littéraire, 1963–1967, Volume 3: Impostures: journal littéraire, 1968–1973, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 2002–2004.

Sous le signe de Mars (autobiographical novel; title means "Under the Sign of Mars"), Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Claude Michel Cluny is a French writer and artist whose writing is influenced by his experience of fine art, by his travels, and by the motion-picture industry. Cluny has written poetry, stories, criticism, and novels, and his complete works are collected and published by Editions de la Différence.

Alice-Catherine Carls stated in World Literature Today that "Cluny's main characters are complex young men totally focused on what is essential to them. Their feeling toward death defines them and makes them live and love without hesitation or remorse, with the cruelty of innocence. Facing them, and perhaps the better to reveal them, are what the French call les minables—hypocrites and meanies, vain and base people. His female characters are with few exceptions on the low end of the scale." Carls pointed to the foreign influences on Cluny's work, noting that few of his characters are French, and many of his works have historical settings, including the post-U.S. Civil War American South and 1960s Seattle. She called Cluny's language "extraordinarily dense, blending with Shakespearean ease the literary or erudite word with ordinary slang, interweaving curvy, singing descriptive sentences with terse dialogues."

Seattle, Washington is the setting for Cluny's novel Vide ta bière dans ta tombe (title means "Finish Your Beer in Your Grave"), which features that city's taverns and the proprietor of a sex shop in Alaska. Another novel, Sous le signe de Mars, is the story of a thirteen-year-old French boy who meets a German soldier during World War II. The story tells of the boy's initiation into life and death.

Cluny kept a journal between the ages of eighteen and forty-three, and three volumes have been published to date. The first volume, Le silence de Delphes: journal littéraire, 1948–1962, chronicles World War II, French politics during the period of the Algerian War, and the literary and artistic figures of the time. It reveals that Cluny destroyed the paintings and writings he felt to be substandard before publishing his first novel, La balle au bond in 1961. Carls reviewed Le silence de Delphes in World Literature Today, calling the author "a wonderful chronicler. Writing to take leave of his self he constructs his narrative into vignettes surrounded by creative silences. Recording his wonderment, his discoveries, and his unadulterated emotion for beauty, he creates a feast of colors and words." Carls felt that Cluny escaped the destruction he witnessed as a youth by writing about history and other civilizations, saying that "it is this flight from bourgeois conventions, this thirst for 'elsewhere,' that is most representative of his life and work."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cluny, Claude Michel, L'invention du temps, Volume 1: Le silence de Delphes: journal littéraire, 1948–1962, Volume 2: Années de sable: journal littéraire, 1963–1967, Volume 3: Impostures: journal littéraire, 1968–1973, Editions de la Différence (Paris, France), 2002–04.

PERIODICALS

World Literature Today, fall, 1996, Alice-Catherine Carls, "Oeuvre romanesque," p. 915; October-December, 2003, Alice-Catherine Carls, review of Le silence de Delphes, p. 111.