Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4 (Volume 4)

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) #4

by Michel Leiris, Richard Sieburth (Translator)

The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by Richard Sieburth
 
Ex-surrealist and maverick anthropologist Michel Leiris (1901–1990) crafted his multivolume autobiography over the course of thirty-five years, profoundly influencing generations of French writers, from Sartre and Beauvoir to Modiano and Ernaux. In this fourth and final volume, Richard Sieburth completes the project of bringing Leiris’s monumental experiment in self-portraiture into English.
 
With wit and playfulness, Leiris assembled a scrapbook of fragments—journal extracts, travel notes, transcriptions of dreams, poems—to document the vagaries of a life committed to the difficult marriage of poetry and revolutionary politics, which he witnessed firsthand in Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and on the Paris streets in May ’68.
 
Frail Riffs is a fugue-like record of the twilight of a life, at once a painstaking self-examination and a chronicle of a century. As Leiris wrote, it is “neither a private diary nor a formal work, neither an autobiographical narrative nor a work of the imagination, neither prose nor poetry, but all this at the same time. . . . A perpetual work in progress.”

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1991

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

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This long awaited conclusion to Michel Leiris' ambitious autobiographical project marks a break in style from the dense, convoluted prose of the first three volumes, opening up into a more fragmented collection of shorter prose pieces and essays, many no more than half a page, most two or three, with the longest running to 40 pages. Inserted among these pieces are lists, exercises in word play, and odd little poems. In this sense it is the missing link between the Rules of the Game series and its coda, The Ribbon At Olympia's Throat. This work is, as translator Richard Sieburth says, more open and vulnerable.
Written between 1966 and 1975 (but incorporating fragments of earlier journal entries as well) Leiris is now in his later 60s and early 70s. Death is a regular preoccupation, but that's nothing new. Fear of death is a feature of his work throughout his life. The various pieces are not necessarily chronological, but he does tend to cluster themes. He writes about a delegation to Cuba that he participated in and he writes about the Liberation of Paris in WWII, and the student demonstrations of the 60s. Always left leaning and a supporter of the ideal of Revolution (in true Leiris fashion, aware of the contradiction of his own bourgeois life and his distaste for physical risk or pain), he manages to present a self assessment of himself as an anti-racist who longs for peace and equality regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality and so on. This is, for me, the beauty of Leiris that comes through in this deeply introspective life project—he is modest, discreet, often self-deprecating , but he is able to examine his life (and as a Paris intellectual and ethnographer whose life spanned the greater part of the 20th century he saw and experienced much) with the sole goal of trying to determine how to live honestly in accord with his own values.
This volume is perhaps easier to read than the earlier volumes, but it will be a richer experience for those familiar with Leiris' idiosyncratic and endlessly engaging self investigation.
My published review of Frail Riffs can be found here: https://minorliteratures.com/2024/05/...

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5