Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum:
MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richard Sieburth as Frail Riffs,rather than the more straightforward “faint noise”—is now finally available in English. This memoir project spans the years 1948 to 1976, which is roughly the middle of Leiris’s writing career. There were, in fact, memoirs published before and after this project, and a massive set of journals (only available in French as of now) that stretch across his life from young adulthood right up to death. Taken in sum, almost all of Leiris’s writings qualify as what he called “essais autobiographiques.”
Leiris often reminds me of artists like Chris Marker who work across disciplines and scatter their thoughts hither and yon, poets who put their work into different containers precisely to fight against a quick summary of their intentions. Leiris gestures at least once to the fact that this memoir—“too waxed, too polished”—is as much an act of poetry as it is a form of reporting.
more here.
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