Ren Leys [Paperback]

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.""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 BouillierVictor 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 inStèles(1912), his masterpiece novel,René Leys(1922), andEquipée(1929), an account of an imaginary expedition, were all inspired by his contact with Chinese culture. His other works range fromLe Fils du ciel, an early novel about China, and a long prose poem,Thibet—both unpublished during his lifetime&mdasl£Â