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 His other works range from Le Fils du ciel, an early novel about China, and a long prose poem, Thibet—both unpublished during his lifetime—to various essays on the arts and especially on the works of Gauguin and Rimbaud, as well as two libretti for his friend the composer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. »

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. He received the 2008 Erasmus Prize. His novel The China Lover was published in September 2008. »

René Leys

By Victor Segalen
Translated from the French by J.A. Underwood
Preface by Ian Buruma

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."

Reviews

There is something of The Wanderer in René Leys, a mythical poetic quality. . . This book's appeal is such that we are held until the end, prisoners of a marvellous ambiguity.
— L'Express

Segalen actively sought to invent new modes of writing, transgressing established boundaries and bringing the exigencies of style to bear on the complex reality he perceived by dint of his various guises as ethnographer, musicologist, doctor, archaeologist, sinologist and poet. . . . Staging a shadow-play between the real and the imaginary, Segalen's brilliant René Leys is at once an epistemological fiction, a roman-a-clef, a meta-fictional meditation and an exercise in auto-fiction.
— The Times Literary Supplement

Allegorical in nature, René Leys probes the frustrations of man's inability to grasp the unknown with all the energy of a thriller.
— Publishers Weekly

Also see:

To Each His Own
By Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke
Introduction by W.S. Di Piero

To Each His Own is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia—a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.
Peking Story
By David Kidd
Preface by John Lanchester

"Kidd's pieces are simple, graceful, comic, mournful miniatures of an ominous catastrophe, the unprecedently swift death of a uniquely ancient civilization." —John Updike

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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)


Jul 31, 2003
240 pages
ISBN: 1590170415
9781590170410
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in French

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