Scraps

"I read with fervor the literary works of Michel Leiris and in particular the four volumes of 'Rules of the Game'...He is incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century."--Claude Livi-Strauss In this second volume of his acclaimed four-volume autobiography, 'Rules of the Game'--now available for the first time in English--Leiris comes to terms with self-reflection as disillusionment. In the midst of doubts about his own motives in writing an autobiography, he recalls that life, after all, has delights worth remembering: sights at the end of the world and the beginning of time, palm trees, breadfruit trees, colossal ferns. But even these things surrounded people living in miserable conditions. What could be said of human life, or of his own life, when his memory was unreliable, his eyesight failing, his mood in the bottom of a hole?
"In Leiris's' Rules of the Game' Volume 2, I found again those qualities that had riveted me in Volume 1: those spirals of words coiling in on themselves and unrolling again into infinity, drilling onto the abysses of the past and the heart, yet glittering there in broad daylight, reflecting from image to image toward a secret that vanishes at the very instant it seems it must appear, the search having no other outcome than itself in the slow revolution of its thousand mirrors."--Simone de Beauvoir