The third volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time in a brilliant translation by Lydia Davis

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 (first published as Fibrilles in 1966), the third volume of Leiris’s memoir The Rules of the Game, invites us to discover why Lévi-Strauss proclaimed Leiris “incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century.”

Leiris’s monumental autobiography, 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, along with the mundane: his walk to work, his visits to spas and galleries, his goals as a writer. He also details his suicidal “descent into Hell,” when the guilt over an extramarital affair becomes unbearable and he overdoses on barbiturates. 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.

Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a profoundly influential and versatile French intellectual and the author of Manhood and Phantom Africa. His four-volume autobiographical essay The Rules of the Game serves as a primary document of artistic life in the twentieth century. Lydia Davis has received numerous awards as a translator of works from the French and as the author of the bestselling fiction collections Collected Stories and Can’t and Won’t.