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The listicle perfected: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘The Missing Pieces’

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We are a culture that likes to make lists. We have top 10s. We have the five best. The three worst. We have every story ever written on Buzzfeed. But Henri Lefebvre’s “The Missing Pieces” turns the listicle into a platform for storytelling, a funereal poetry of sort. The book is an 83-page list of objects, ideas and concepts that have been lost, gone missing or simply never been seen in Western culture.

Among the missing chronicled in Lefebvre’s brief entries are the destruction of the library at Sarajevo, which was bombed in 1992-93; the whitewashing of Diego Rivera’s controversial Rockefeller Center mural in 1934; the poetry of Cicero; a never-seen rock opera written by American sculptor Dan Graham; and the disappearance of the final seven meters of Jack Kerouac’s original scroll manuscript of “On the Road,” which were eaten by a dog.

Lefebvre, a French poet and publisher (not to be confused with the Marxist philosopher of the same name), first published “The Missing Pieces” in French in 2004. It is now available in English for the first time (translated by David L. Sweet) from art publisher Semiotext(e). I can’t recommend it enough. The entries are short, tightly written fragments — a funny, absurd, poignant and melancholy gathering of things that once were, but are now gone.

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Certainly, the whole exercise is permeated with plenty of dry humor. One listing pokes a stick at a fellow French poet: “‘The Field of May’ by Pierre Oster; missing a comma on page 124, line 7.” Another lists Internet art among the missing, because “any work of virtual art is hereby condemned to disappear.” A particularly acerbic entry states: “The pregnancies of Frida Kahlo.”

But what makes the book really worth reading (or at least dipping into at random) is that many entries are stories unto themselves. Consider: “In 1945, the deaf Japanese photographer Koki Inoue loses his negatives in a bombardment he does not hear.” That sentence alone could practically be its own movie.

Or this, about the 18th century painter Francisco Goya: “In 1899, the Spanish demand Goya’s remains, dead and buried in Bordeaux in 1828; the body, without the head, is returned to Spain.” Some suspect it was taken for study by phrenologists, who were taken seriously at the time. Certainly, there’s some Sherlock Holmes-level mystery behind that missing head.

Then there’s the final entry of the book, about the European artists Balthus and Alberto Giacometti: “In 1959, Balthus asks Giacometti to give the canvas ‘Coffee Pot with Three Fruits’ to a waiter named Henri, whom they both know; forty years later, the painting is mysteriously found in the Giacometti estate; Henri still hasn’t been identified.”

One begins to ponder alternate realities, such as how this mysterious waiter’s life might have been transformed (or not) if he’d come to possess a canvas by Balthus.

For those interested in the missing, think of this as a work not to be missed.

“The Missing Pieces” by Henri Lefebevre, translation by David L. Sweet, is now available from Semiotext(e); $12.

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Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.

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