Synopsis
Traces the life of the eminent anthropologist, surrealist, and author
Reviews
This confessional autobiography by Leiris, French anthropologist, surrealist poet and critic, often seems like one more exercise in French intellectual gamesmanship. Originally published in 1948, it's filled with baroque, convoluted sentences as Leiris obsessively analyzes himself, his childhood dreams and his associations to scores of words and phrases. Yet readers who stay the course will find some reward in this verbal thicket as Leiris, who died last year at the age of 89, offers occasional indelible reflections on gnomes, photography, war, Stravinsky, hedgehogs and anything else that enters his field of consciousness. In this first of four volumes, Leiris recollects his youth, life in Paris under the German occupation and travels in North Africa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Leiris (Bris‚es, 1990), best known to American readers through the remarkable autobiographical meditation Manhood (1963), was one of the great midcentury French phenomenologists of the self, a relentless crusher of experience down to crystals ever more fine. This work, the first in a volume of four, was published in 1948 in Paris, and now appears for the first time in English. Somewhat more chronological than the looser Manhood, this is Leiris as a word- sculptor of himself, shaping artificially what life refuses to give shape to. But the chisel is always slipping: the book is made up of ever-more minute cracks and chips--eye-crossingly tiny investigations of what toys certain songs reminded him of, what textures certain colors brought to mind (the whole synesthesia apparatus that Rimbaud would will to French literature when he first associated vowels with colors). Most of the time it's awfully tedious, though. Later sections of the book go into schoolday memories and the meaning of Sunday and Leiris's first leanings to anthropology, but the early parts are so set on agonizingly describing the personal associations raised by the sounds and misperceived meanings of French words that an English reader indulges the conceit with less and less patience. Leiris, here, exports less than well. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Anthropologist and surrealist poet Leiris, who died in 1990 at age 89, was well known for his autobiographical work. In this first of a four-volume self-study, originally published in 1948, the author meticulously reflects upon his hopes, fears, and obsessions during his childhood in Paris, experiences under the German occupation, and military service in Africa. He does so in the absence of sustained narrative. Instead, the text unwinds through analysis of specific words that unleash a Proustian flood of sensations and memories. To retain this emphasis on French language, the translator has wisely chosen to maintain many words in the original French. Leiris's style is ponderous and convoluted and his sentence structure complex. The appearance of his works in English--translations of the remaining volumes are planned--will give a wider audience to this important French author. This is recommended for academic French literature collections.
- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
