A great literary and historical fresco bringing together the lives of forty-one Martins, from the 4th century to the present day.
The lives of saints, soldiers, missionaries, colonists, heroes, bastards, swindlers, artists, explorers… Most of them are forgotten or anonymous, with only one thing in common, their family name: Martin.
Jean-Pierre Martin immerses himself in their various eras, probing their multiple origins, reconstituting their landscapes, and following them in their peregrinations, in order to compose a documented fiction that crosses history and continents, from the 4th century (life of Martinus, originator of the patronymic) to today (the life of Trayvon Martin, a young man of seventeen who was murdered by the police and became an icon of black America).
It is a worldwide and encyclopedic epic on the human condition, cut through with joyful and playful erudition. It is also a meditative fable about memory, written or oral transmission, its lures, accuracy and approximations, its questions: what remains of a man? How to tell a life storytelling?
It is finally a literary challenge: the undertaking of a great patronymic story and the adventure of a very common proper name.
