Fibrils

“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

“There is no better translator than Lydia Davis, who has not only rendered in its necessarily complex light this infinitely important text of autobiographical-reflective thoughts and counterthoughts, but provided a sumptuous and clarifying introduction to its elegant author.”—Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

“Fibrilles, the French title of volume three of Leiris’s autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, has exactly the same connotations as its English cognate, Fibrils: small fibers or, in botany, the ultimate subdivisions of a plant root—which Leiris here punningly entwines with all the ‘febrile’ filaments of terror or hallucination that striate the natural history of his mind. Throughout her translation, Lydia Davis pays minute attention to the adventitious rhizomes of Leiris’s sentences, which move forward by ever moving laterally, disclosing the self by an endless process of subterranean deferral. Davis has now been transplanting Leiris into English for a quarter of a century: her craft as a translator shows in her own writing, as it does here on every page.”—Richard Sieburth