The Mauritian writer Malcolm de Chazal's great masterwork, Sens-Plastique, was published in France in 1948, with a preface by Jean Paulhan, a year after its publication in Mauritius. Since that
time, the work has attained a near-legendary status and readers have discovered in de Chazal's brilliant aphorisms what the author himself described as a synthesizing of a "new view of life"
requiring a unique title. "I finally settled on Sens-Plastique because apart from the fact that it seems to say that everything on earth is sensuously connected to everything else and that we
all belonged to the same mold, 'plastic' suggests art in all its forms. I liked that because I consider my whole enterprise to be more of a picture than a book."
Although two previous selections of Weiss's remarkable translations of this major work have previously been published (first by Herder and Herder in 1971 and then by Sun in 1979), no complete
edition of the translation has been available until now.
