Missing Pieces

‧ A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removedfrom the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels arediscovered ‧ A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailedalive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop thefilm, look at the photograph, and destroy it ‧ The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst,burned by the Nazis -- from The Missing Pieces

The MissingPieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in somecases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes thehistory 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, orknown about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality onthe enigmatic creations it recounts -- rather than reminding us of the death that inhabitseverything humans create.

Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's(accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven'spubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's Treatise on theRainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript forOn the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erasedbefore an audience); and the one moment in Andre Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "Ibelieve, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." The Missing Pieces offers atreasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored ofthe void.

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.