Scraps

“A multivolume memoir that is thoroughly Proustian . . . beautifully translated from the French by Lydia Davis . . . Like Proust, Leiris is for readers with patience and a love for language . . . Leiris’s subject is not simply himself, or his thoughts and feelings and actions, but writing itself.”—Jon M. Sweeney, America

“[A] magnificent English translation by Lydia Davis . . . Before Elena Ferrante, before Karl Ove Knausgaard, before the contemporary flourishing of autobiographical narrative, there was Michel Leiris’s memoir . . . Like watching an acrobat, the reader marvels at Leiris’s narrator moving, now slowly, now swiftly, through a series of sinuous loops, curls, and excursions.”—Tim Watson, Public Books

"I read with fervor the literary works of Michel Leiris and in particular the four volumes of Rules of the Game... He is incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century."—Claude Lévi-Strauss

"In Leiris's Rules of the Game Volume 2, I found again those qualities that had riveted me in Volume 1: those spirals of words coiling in on themselves and unrolling again into infinity, drilling into the abysses of the past and the heart,  yet glittering there in broad daylight, reflecting from image to image toward a secret that vanishes at the very instant it seems it must appear, the search having no other outcome than itself in the slow revolution of its thousand mirrors."—Simon de Beauvoir