Fibrils
The Rules of the Game, Volume 3
Published on 2. May 2017
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-300-21239-6 (ISBN)
Description
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 Levi-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.
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 Levi-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.
Reviews / Votes
"There is no better translator than Lydia Davis, who has not only rendered in its necessarily complex light this infinitely important text of autobiographical-reflective thoughts and counterthoughts, but provided a sumptuous and clarifying introduction to its elegant author."-Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry"Fibrilles, the French title of volume three of Leiris's autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, has exactly the same connotations as its English cognate, Fibrils: small fibers or, in botany, the ultimate subdivisions of a plant root-which Leiris here punningly entwines with all the 'febrile' filaments of terror or hallucination that striate the natural history of his mind. Throughout her translation, Lydia Davis pays minute attention to the adventitious rhizomes of Leiris's sentences, which move forward by ever moving laterally, disclosing the self by an endless process of subterranean deferral. Davis has now been transplanting Leiris into English for a quarter of a century: her craft as a translator shows in her own writing, as it does here on every page."-Richard Sieburth
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-21239-6 (9780300212396)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2017
1st Edition
De Gruyter
€38.09
Available for download
Persons
Michel Leiris (1901-1990) was a profoundly influential and versatile French intellectual and the author of Manhood and Phantom Africa. His four-volume autobiographical essay The Rules of the Game serves as a primary document of artistic life in the twentieth century. Lydia Davis has received numerous awards as a translator of works from the French and as the author of the bestselling fiction collections Collected Stories and Can't and Won't.