Overview

"An incantatory catalog of cultural artifacts either lost to time or never realized.. A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered . A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it . The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis -from The Missing Pieces The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was- the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts-rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create. Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in Andre Malraux's life in which he exclaimed ""I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing."" The Missing Pieces offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void."

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9781584351597

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Reviews

The Missing Pieces is a list not only to be read an item at a time, but, as the very cover of the book itself might imply, to be viewed as a mishmash of things forgotten, and of things we need to dutifully remember. -- Micah McCrary Bookslut

The Missing Pieces is a list not only to be read an item at a time, but, as the very cover of the book itself might imply, to be viewed as a mishmash of things forgotten, and of things we need to dutifully remember. -- Micah McCrary Bookslut Into a contemporary landscape of data mining and information fracking comes Henri Lefebvre's The Missing Pieces, a beautifully absurd accumulation of useless numbers and gravid blankness... Like history's own compacted narrative, Lefebvre's economy of restraint holds countless events suspended in a semicolon. -- Prudence Peiffer Bookforum I can't recommend it enough. The entries are short, tightly written fragments -- a funny, absurd, poignant and melancholy gathering of things that once were, but are now gone. -- Carolina Miranda Los Angeles Times The Missing Pieces has as much to do with presence as with absence, and this tells us something about the canon, and -- forgive me -- about poetry in general. I mean that no equivalent list of artworks or gains or successes could be so powerful as The Missing Pieces. 3:AM Magazine

Author Information

Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry. Kate Zambreno, the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl and the work Heroines (Semiotext(e)), teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the persistence of art, which includes Book of Mutter and the forthcoming Drifts.

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