"This is the most under-covered, undervalued release of 2014. Weiss is one of the four or five greatest post-war European authors, and this autofictional masterpiece more or less superannuates all of the autofiction that follows. A brutally honest account of bourgeois decay, artistic development — Weiss was a polymath who painted, filmed, and wrote in virtually every form — and sexual maturation, Leavetaking forms one have of a larger novel called Exiles. I hope Melville House publishes the second half soon."
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