Rules of the Game: Scraps

In this second volume of his acclaimed four-volume autobiography, Rules of the Game--now available for the first time in English--Leiris comes to terms with self-reflection as disillusionment. In the midst of doubts about his own motives in writing an autobiography, he recalls that life, after all, has delights worth remembering: sights at the end of the world and the beginning of time, palm trees, breadfruit trees, colossal ferns. But even these things surrounded people living in miserable conditions. What could be said of human life, or of his own life, when his memory was unreliable, his eyesight failing, his mood in the bottom of a hole?