The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, by Simon Leys

[Trevor]

The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays



Publication Date: July 30, 2013
Pages: 456
With a foreword by the author.

Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now.

The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Contents:

Part I: Quixotism
-The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote
-An Empire of Ugliness
-Lies That Tell the Truth

Part II: Literature
-The Prince of Ligne, or the Eighteenth Century Incarnate
-Balzac
-Victor Hugo
-Victor Segalen Revisited Through His Complete Correspondence
-Chesterton: The Poet Who Dances with a Hundred Legs
-Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide
-Malraux
-The Intimate Orwell
-Terror of Babel: Evelyn Waugh
-The Truth of Simenon
-The Belgianness of Henri Michaux
-The Sins of the Son: The Posthumous Publication of Nabokov's Unfinished Novel
-Cunning Like a Hedgehog
-The Experience of Literary Translation
-On Readers' Rewards and Writers' Awards
-Writers and Money
-Overtures

Part III: China
-The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past
-One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy
-An Introduction to Confucius
-Poetry and Painting: Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics
-Ethics and Aesthetics: The Chinese Lesson
-Orientalism and Sinology
-The China Experts
-Roland Barthes in China
-The Wake of an Empty Boat: Zhou Enlai
-Aspects of Mao Zedong
-The Art of Interpreting Non-Existence Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page
-The Curse of the Man Who Could See the Little Fish at the Bottom of the Ocean
-The Cambodian Genocide
-Anatomy of a "Post-Totalitarian" Dictatorship: The Essays of Liu Xiaobo on China Today

Part IV: The Sea
-Foreword to The Sea in French Literature
-In the Wake of Magellan
-Richard Henry Dana and His Two Years Before the Mast

Part V: University
-The Idea of University
-A Fable from Academe

Part VI: Marginalia
-I Prefer Reading
-A Way of Living
-Tell Them I Said Something
-Detours
-Memento Mori