100 pages Text by Frédéric Roux 17 x 10.3 cm Language: French Paperback Publisher: Éditions Allia 2025
Boxing is the starting point, but never the destination. With the sharp wit and restless energy that have defined his work, Frédéric Roux turns the ring into a prism through which life itself is refracted: its blows, its recoveries, its absurdities. Echoing Faulkner’s injunction to “write what you know,” Roux writes boxing not as a sport, but as a way of seeing, where every jab is also a memory, every knockout a metaphor.
Here, champions and has-beens, sparring partners and spectators mingle with an unlikely cast of characters: a washed-up painter, a George Clooney lookalike in uniform, a Padre Pio of the suburbs. From the Fondation Cartier to the Bains Douches, from the Pyrenean forests to the sweaty glow of fight nights, Roux stages encounters that are by turns tragic, comic, and tender.
Mes petites morts is not a memoir, nor a novel, nor reportage, but something in between: a collage of stories where the personal dissolves into the universal. Beneath the surface of hooks and uppercuts lies the author’s meditation on aging, desire, disappearance, and survival; the everyday battles we all fight, in and out of the ring.
