<P>• A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removedfrom the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels arediscovered • A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailedalive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop thefilm, look at the photograph, and destroy it • The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst,burned by the Nazis -- from <I>The Missing Pieces</P><P>The MissingPieces</I> is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in somecases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes thehistory of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems,symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, orknown about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality onthe enigmatic creations it recounts -- rather than reminding us of the death that inhabitseverything humans create. </P><P>Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's(accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven'spubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); <I>Spinoza's Treatise on theRainbow</I> (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for<I>On the Road</I> (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erasedbefore an audience); and the one moment in André Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "Ibelieve, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." <I>The Missing Pieces</I> offers atreasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored ofthe void.</P>