One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature,Phantom Africais a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work a book composed of one mans compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journalby turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and moroseas well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Sur