Construit comme un journal intime daté du 30 mars 1911 au 22 novembre de la même année, durant les derniers mois de la dynastie Qing, le roman met en scène le narrateur et son professeur de mandchou, René Leÿs, fils d'épicier belge prétendant avoir ses entrées au sein de la Cité Interdite.
Ce livre mythique a inspiré son pseudonyme à Simon Leys.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Segalen-Rene-Leys/37510

> Victor Segalen, RENÉ LEYS, roman (éd. Plon, 1950).
— Id., STÈLES, Peintures, Equipée, édition revue et augmentée de nombreux textes inédits, préface de Pierre-Jean Jouve (Le Club du Meilleur Livre, 1955).
— Id., NOTES SUR L'EXOTISME (revue du Mercure de France, mars et avril 1955).
Se reporter au compte rendu de Hubert JUIN
In: Revue Esprit Nouvelle Série, No. 232 (10/11) (NOVEMBRE 1955), pp. 1794-1800

I can't even begin to describe how thoroughly enthralled I was by this novel. (And how happy I was to not have read the introduction before reading the book.) An entrancing account of China in 1911 from a European perspective, this is a book of being on the outside looking in, and of romanticizing the unknown. And was absolutely a pleasure to read. Recommended very highly, this is the best fiction I've read in quite a while! ( )

Pierre Ryckmans, whom I admire more day by day as I read his essays collected as The Hall of Uselessness, took his pen name of Simon Leys from the title character of this book, and one wondered why, and who Victor Segalen is.

Rene Leys is a well-wrought, innovative, and consistently compelling novel about the way China can capture a westerner's imagination, a certain kind of westerner, open to the culture and history of the ancient kingdom, and with a touch of romance to the soul.

The novel immerses its readers in the world –- and it is truly a world of its own -- of early 20th-century "Pei-King" at the end of the imperial rule, arriving at a surprising and somewhat disconcerting denouement. It's impossible to say much more about the plot without saying too much; at least in part it's a sort of mystery.

The translation by J. A. Underwood is effortless and attractive, and you should not read either of the two prefaces, by the translator and by Ian Buruma, in advance, or the book will not be able to operate as it was designed to –- go directly to the novel itself.

Rene Leys has been reissued in a beautiful new NY Books edition, so well designed and of such quality materials that, after so many novels on near-newsprint, it's a small separate pleasure. But not on the scale of the work itself –- highly recommended, and the internet will provide useful and enjoyable images, including diagrams of the Beijing imperial palace at the time.

My edition of this book, an old 'Quartet Encounters' (they specialized in Euro lit that wasn't published in the U.S. or U.K., and many of their titles are now published by NYRB), features a blurb from Publishers Weekly on how the novel "probes the frustrations of man's inability to grasp the unknown." But I must disrespectfully disagree, because if the book was that, I would have been bored stupid, and also not able to concentrate, because quotes from every important philosopher since Kant would have constantly been passing through my head, to the effect that we can grasp the unknown just fine provided we don't assume to begin with that the unknown can't be grasped.

Thankfully, RL is much less than a meditation on epistemological agony and the deep, deep profundities of the abyss: it is a story about the way Europeans look at and think about The Mystical Orient, or, in this case, China. Now, I'm very sensitive to issues surrounding Yellow Fever. I have a friend who's dated east Asian women, and he knows men who openly say that they would never date a non-Asian woman because they fantasize about the Orient and traditional gender roles and submissive little Asian women with tiny feet. That makes me uncomfortable because my wife happens to come from a Korean family. Luckily my wife's about as submissive as a lioness, so I don't feel too guilty. But the point is, I'm predisposed to read this book as a kind of satire on the narrator, and men (and women) like him, who are so obsessed with the Mysteries and Inscrutability of Orientals that they can't see the blitheringly obvious: that most people from China/Japan/Korea etc are just like most people from everywhere else, i.e., stupid, violent, arrogant, hidebound and greedy as heck.

Taken as such a satire, the book is excellent: the narrator's mind, such as it is, is on full display in his style, and though Segalen is supposed to have written the book to prove that you can write a novel without a plot, he's only half-succeeded. Nothing much happens to the narrator, it's true, but the plot is just kind of outsourced onto his friend, Rene Leys, and the nation of China. Plenty happens to both of them.

As a philosophical allegory of epistemological uncertainties, however, the book stinks. I prefer to think that was the furthest thing from Segalen's mind.

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