Michel Leiris
One of the towering classics of twentieth-century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1930, Michel Leiris was an ...