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.
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A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 
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Why did the nurse need a red crayon?
Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf Wife of Bath, who rides astride in bright red stockings; the Canon alchemist, so sweaty from the ride that his horse is a lather of suds; the “ful vicious” Pardoner with his jar of dubious holy “pigges bones”; and the garlic-loving Summoner, with a face so pimply “children were aferd”—Chaucer knew them all. As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard (Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess (1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.”
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Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, 
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