Fibrils

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) #3

by Michel Leiris, Lydia Davis (Translator)

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.

Genres: Literature, France

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Born in Paris in 1901, Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. In the 1920s he became a member of the surrealist movement and contributed to La révolution surréaliste. In those years, he wrote a surrealist novel: Aurora.

After his exit from the surrealist group, he teamed up with Georges Bataille in the magazine Documents.

Reviews

[Always Pouting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't really familiar with Michel Leiris before reading this but he was a french writer and ethnographer who was involved with surrealism as well. The translator begins the book with a short introduction into Leiris which was really helpful for me because she explained what appealed to her about Leiris's writing. I don't think this is the kind of book that would be appealing to just anyone because it is a really dense read because of Leiris's obsession with using words precisely. Also the book is written in a stream of conscious sort of way so that his writing wanders from one thing to the next and it can be hard to keep track of what he is trying to get at. I had to reread certain passages because I didn't really grasp the whole meaning the first time around. The translator Lydia Davis though warns of this in the introduction and talks about his great use of language so I wasn't really bothered by it I was expecting it. His writing is very eloquent and a lot of the things he said were insightful and I could relate to. I found it a worthwhile read and want to read more of his writing , I even wish I could read it in the original French because translations always tend to lose the potency of the original writing. If anyone else wants to read it though I would go to it knowing that it's a dense read that seems to go off on tangents and may not be enjoyable to everyone.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, I am a huge admirer of Michel Leiris. Possibly the only writer I have read so intently. This book is the third of Leiris' major autobiographical project in which he, by examining himself and his endeavour to write honestly about his experience of the world, sought to determine a set of rules to, if not live by, at least create by. And near the end of Fibrils he does just that. Of the three volumes, this is the most coherent and satisfying as Leiris focuses on two major events in his mid-life—a trip to China in the 1950s as a member of one of the delegations of French intellectuals sympathetic with Communist, to visit the country when that first became a possibility after Mao came to power, and his nearly successful suicide attempt, triggered by guilt over an affair, that put him in a coma for several days and necessitated a lengthy recovery. It is, like volume one and two, a dense text with Leiris' trademark lengthy, layered sentences and frequent, extensive digressions. There is even a sense of closure at the end.
However, he is not done. He launched into a fourth volume, almost as soon as this was complete, but his style opens up and becomes more fragmentary with stories, journal entries and poems. That final part of Rules of the Game, Frail Riffs, is finally coming out in English and I have a copy and will be reviewing it for publication.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very dense read for me. "Fibrils" is volume 3 of Michel Leiris' "The Rules of the Game" collection of memoir writing. In this volume, he mostly focuses on his trip to China and his suicide attempt. Not that he stays on those two subject matters, but they are here throughout his rambling narration and inner thoughts. The journal/memoir is very focused on the writer, Leiris, than say humorous times he spent with Andre Breton. Gossip is not what you're getting in these journals, but what you do get is a brilliant mind thinking or writing through a maze to obtain some form of knowledge. His trip to China was an incredible experience for him, but I think his attitude is very western in which how "am I affected" by such a journey. His suicide attempt due to depression over romantic relationship/family issues, is him analyzing the what, how, and why. I don't think he came to a conclusion yet I think Leiris is about the thinking as an activity than the actual thought. Lydia Davis did the translation and she's the master.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leiris can create pages of utter tedium. Stale and stuffy and mind-numbingly pale, like an empty room full of artificial light.

BUT.

Leiris can, when he wants, speak directly for me. In this volume of his poetic autobiography he details in specific and clear prose his various affairs (one a long standing recurrence), his failed suicide attempt, and most astonishingly his convalescence after that failure. It is here, located in a hospital bed, that I was brought to a crawl with vertigo. My time in hospital almost perfectly matched his - while mine was far more physically dramatic and dangerous - he spoke the unspeakable. The fixation of his mind, warped by painkillers and boredom, flies into minute detail about the past. Obsessed with love and art as he learned it through opera and his musical cousins costumed bare thighs, Leiris illustrates the attentive delirium of recovery.

Just when I need him the most, I find myself consoled by this self-doubting french Surrealist, museum guard. How I love him for this book.

[Andrew Bertaina]

Imperfect in many ways and occasionally dazzling. It sounds like a book jacket, but it's true.
The last page 1.5 is fire. He sums up how routine and normal his whole life as. Though he wanted to live a poetic life, in the end, even though he was a good socialist, signing petitions and going to some protests, a successful writer, at times, a giving person, he discovers in this last scorching analysis, not long before his death that he's had a life of the masses beyond his one poetic and stupid gesture, which he writes about in this book. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.

[Alice Rovani · Rating 4 out of 5]

tonitruante et sinueuse méditation sur la mort (manquée ou non), toujours titubant aux portes de la Poésie : il prie, refuse d’entrer, démolit parfois ses structures. Jamais son écriture ne manquera de marquer les empreintes de ces combats