When a small ornament connects us to the real world: Le ruban au cou d’Olympia by Michel Leiris

Le ruban au cou d’Olympia, the adulthood work of Michel Leiris, one of the most original French autobiographers of the 20th century, transgresses generic and artistic borders in order to create an image as faithful as possible of the modern man in the grip of existential anxieties and identity crises. Motley, fragmentary, oscillating between reality and fiction, prose and poetry, text and image, this book is an edifice that the author erects to give his life a meaning and a reality and, ultimately, to save himself from death and oblivion.