Fibrils: The Rules of the Game, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris, Lydia Davis (Translator)

Overview

A major publishing event: 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, the third volume of his monumental autobiographical project The Rules of the Game, invites us to discover why Lévi-Strauss proclaimed him “incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century.”
 
Leiris’s autobiographical essay, 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. He also details his suicidal “descent into Hell,” when the guilt over an extramarital affair becomes unbearable. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300227857
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/28/2017
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

A multivolume memoir that is thoroughly Proustian . . . beautifully translated from the French by Lydia Davis. . . . Like Proust, Leiris is for readers with patience and a love for language. . . . Leiris’s subject is not simply himself, or his thoughts and feelings and actions, but writing itself.”—Jon M. Sweeney, America

“[A] magnificent English translation by Lydia Davis. . . . Before Elena Ferrante, before Karl Ove Knausgaard, before the contemporary flourishing of autobiographical narrative, there was Michel Leiris’s memoir. . . . Like watching an acrobat, the reader marvels at Leiris’s narrator moving, now slowly, now swiftly, through a series of sinuous loops, curls, and excursions.”—Tim Watson, Public Books

“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

From the Publisher