Fibrils: The Rules of the Game, Volume 3 (A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book)
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good / Good. Item #2346161
ISBN: 9780300212396
First edition. Slightly smoky. Top corner of jacket stained, jacket lighlty soiled. Ink name on front endpaper.
xiv, 234 pp. The third volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time in a brilliant translation by Lydia Davis. A beloved and versatile author and ethnographer, French intellectual Michel Leiris is often ranked in the company of Proust, Gide, Sartre, and Camus, yet his work remains largely unfamiliar to English-language readers. This brilliant translation of Fibrils (first published as Fibrilles in 1966), the third volume of Leiris’s memoir The Rules of the Game, invites us to discover why Lévi-Strauss proclaimed Leiris “incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century.” Leiris’s monumental autobiography, a thirty-five-year project, is a primary document of the examined life in the twentieth century. In Fibrils, Leiris reconciles literary commitment with social/political engagement. He recounts extensive travel and anthropological work, including a 1955 visit to Mao’s China, along with the mundane: his walk to work, his visits to spas and galleries, his goals as a writer. He also details his suicidal “descent into Hell,” when the guilt over an extramarital affair becomes unbearable and he overdoses on barbiturates. A ruthless self-examiner, Leiris seeks to invent a new way of remembering, probe the mechanisms of memory, and explore the way a life can be told.
Price: $12.00