René Leys (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Segalen, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170415 ISBN 13: 9781590170410

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2003

Synopsis

In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of "an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."

About this title

Review:

"Strange and memorable...Segalen had seen the truth in his lies and has left them this beautiful endorsement." --The Japan Times

"An allegorical novel of Being [that] beneath the mask of irony Segalen poured into this book all the anguish of man in thrall to his limitations...this is the novel of the Impossibility of Knowing." --Henri Bouillier

About the Author:

Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was born in Brest and trained as a naval doctor. His first literary work, Les Immémoriaux, is based on his experiences in Tahiti, where he held a medical post for roughly two years. Written upon his return to France in 1905, the book, part novel, part documentary, looks at the influence of French missionaries on native life, and departs from other colonial writings of its time by taking up the perspective of the colonized. In 1909, after studying Chinese for a year, Segalen made the first of many journeys to China, participating in several archaeological expeditions. The hieratic prose poems collected in Stèles (1912), his masterpiece novel, René Leys (1922), and Equipée (1929), an account of an imaginary expedition, were all inspired by his contact with Chinese culture. His other works range from Le Fils du ciel, an early novel about China, and a long prose poem, Thibet--both unpublished during his lifetime--to various essays on the arts and especially on the works of Gauguin and Rimbaud, as well as two libretti for his friend the composer Claude Debussy. Segalen's death at the age of forty-one remains a mystery: his body was discovered in a Breton forest, bloodied, though the only apparent injury was to his ankle, with The Complete Works of Shakespeare opened to Hamlet alongside.

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1590170415
• ISBN 13: 9781590170410
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240