Books by Georges Perec
Life A User's Manual
“One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.”―Boston Globe
Structured around a single moment in time ― 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 ― Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary.
From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User’s Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.
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Life A User's Manual
“One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.”―Boston Globe
Structured around a single moment in time ― 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 ― Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary.
From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User’s Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.
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$24.95
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books (Penguin Great Ideas)
A slim volume featuring Georges Perec's writings on the simple task of arranging books and what it can reveal about life
One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world.
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives--and upended them. Now Penguin brings you a new set of the acclaimed Great Ideas, a curated library of selections from the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
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Ellis Island
A moving hybrid work about Ellis Island and immigration by the marvelous Georges Perec
Georges Perec, employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 to 1954, arrived as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is wide-awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: “To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up.” Ellis Island is a slender Perec masterwork, unique among his many singular works.
The acclaimed poet and scholar Mónica de la Torre contributes an afterword that keeps Perec's writing front and center while situating Ellis Island in the context of America’s current fierce battles over immigration.
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I Remember
by Georges Perec, Harold Keeney Doulton
An affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring pointillist autobiography by Georges Perec, a master of postmodern fiction.
The text of this memoir-through-memories consists of 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with “I remember” ― all limited to pieces of public knowledge, brand names and folk wisdom, actors and illnesses, places and things (“I remember Hermès handbags, with their tiny padlocks”).
As playful and puzzling as the best of Perec's novels, I Remember began as a simple writing exercise, and grew into an expansive, exhilarating work of art: the image of one unmistakable and irreplaceable life, shaped from the material of our collective past. For this edition, Perec's 480 memories, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, have been elucidated and explained by critic, translator, and Perec biographer, David Bellos.
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$19.95
w-or-the-memory-of-childhood
From the author of Life A User’s Manual comes an equally mind-bending novel: an interpretive vision of the Holocaust and a dystopian world.
W or The Memory of Childhood is a narrative that reflects a great writer’s effort to come to terms with his childhood during the Nazi occupation of France.
Perec tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing his wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic “ideal,” where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry. As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where “it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving,” and “you have to fight to live...no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out.”
Perec’s memory of the Holocaust and vision about its meaning has resulted in an astonishing achievement that stands with the best of his work.
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La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams
The beguiling, never-before-translated dream diary of Georges Perec
In La Boutique Obscure Perec once again revolutionized literary form, creating the world’s first “nocturnal autobiography.” From 1968 until 1972—the period when he wrote his most well-known works—the beloved French stylist recorded his dreams. But as you might expect, his approach was far from orthodox.
Avoiding the hazy psychoanalysis of most dream journals, he challenged himself to translate his visions and subconscious churnings directly into prose. In laying down the nonsensical leaps of the imagination, he finds new ways to express the texture and ambiguity of dreams—those qualities that prove so elusive.
Beyond capturing a universal experience for the first time and being a fine document of literary invention, La Boutique Obscure contains the seeds of some of Perec’s most famous books. It is also an intimate portrait of one of the great innovators of modern literature.
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The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.
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The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the coming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What’s the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? And should you ask that tricky question about his daughter’s illness?
You can try to navigate these difficult decisions for yourself at www.theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com ...
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to ideas and innovation. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?
Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.
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The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
Darkly funny account of the office worker’s mindset by the celebrated French novelist
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office?
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?
Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.
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Wishes
by Georges Perec, Muon Thi Van
An arresting, poetic journey and a moving reflection on immigration, family, and home, from an acclaimed creative team.
Wishes tells the powerful, honest story about one Vietnamese family's search for a new home on the other side of the world, and the long-lasting and powerful impact that makes on one of the youngest members of the family. Inspired by actual events in the author's life, this is a narrative that is both timely and timeless. Told through the eyes of a young girl, the story chronicles a family's difficult and powerful journey to pack up what they can carry and to leave their world behind, traveling to a new and unknown place in a crowded boat. With sparse, poetic, and lyrical text from acclaimed author Mượn Thị Văn, thoughtful back matter about the author's connection to the story, and luminous, stunning illustrations from Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree Victo Ngai, Wishes tells a powerful and timely story in a gentle and approachable way for young children and their families.
Wishes is a must-have book for every child's bookshelf.
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Wishes
by Georges Perec, Muon Thi Van
Twelve years of Georges Perec’s annual pamphlets filled with homophonic wordplay
“In the beginning was the pun,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. And so it was that Georges Perec brought the good word to his friends and acquaintances on a yearly basis, as an expression of his best wishes for the New Year. Wishes gathers together these ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, printed at his own expense in limited quantities. This paean to the pun consists of a series of short prose pieces, each concluding with a list of the everyday bits of language lying at their root. English proverbs, Latin phrases, the names of musicians, filmmakers, novelists and book titles are all fodder for Perec’s homophonic translations: John Coltrane turns into an anecdote about a wanderer with a severe ring around the collar; Antonioni’s first movie transforms into a prophecy of a murderous holiday; the phrase “All’s well that ends well” becomes a pregnant cow named Alice hailed by a drunk Satan; and Maurice Ravel proves to be a warning against corpses with a predilection for root vegetables.
These texts and their marriage of sound to meaning present a challenge to any translation, and bring into stark relief the choices translators are often forced to make. This English edition sidesteps such choices, offering two alternate translations: a traditional one focused on the literal content of Perec’s texts, and another focused on their formal phonological play.
Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to palindromes. Winner of the prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel, Things, and the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of Oulipo.
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A Void (Verba Mundi)
A mind-bending novel from the author of Life A User’s Manual
A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of displays Georges Perec’s virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E.
The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl’s penchant for word games, especially for “lipograms,” compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl’s verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . .
A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, Time magazine called A Void, “...an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss.”
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La Disparition (French Language Edition) (L'Imaginaire)
"Trahir qui disparut, dans La disparition, ravirait au lisant subtil tout plaisir. Motus donc, sur l'inconnu noyau manquant - "un rond pas tout à fait clos finissant par un trait horizontal" - , blanc sillon damnatif où s'abîma un Anton Voyl, mais d'où surgit aussi la fiction. Disons, sans plus, qu'il a rapport à la vocalisation. L'aiguillon paraîtra à d'aucuns trop grammatical. Vain soupçon : contraint par son savant pari à moult combinaisons, allusions, substitutions ou circonclusions, jamais G.P. n'arracha au banal discours joyaux plus brillants ni si purs. Jamais plus fol alibi n'accoucha d'avatars si mirobolants. Oui, il fallait un grand art, un art hors du commun, pour fourbir tout un roman sans ça !"Bernard Pingaud.
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Les choses
Dans ce récit si simple et si uni qu'il convient d'en souligner l'originalité profonde, Georges Perec tente, le premier avec cette rigueur, de mettre au service d'une entreprise romanesque les enseignements de l'analyse sociologique. Il nous décrit la vie quotidienne d'un jeune couple d'aujourd'hui issu des classes moyennes, l'idée que ces jeunes gens se font du bonheur, les raisons pour lesquelles ce bonheur leur reste inaccessible – car il est lié aux choses que l'on acquiert, il est asservissement aux choses. " C'est qu'il y a [dira Georges Perec] entre les choses du monde moderne et le bonheur, un rapport obligé... Ceux qui se sont imaginé que je condamnais la société de consommation n'ont vraiment rien compris à mon livre. Mais ce bonheur demeure possible ; car, dans notre société capitaliste, c'est : choses promises ne sont pas choses dues. "
Prix Renaudot - 1965
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W ou Le souvenir d'enfance
"Il y a dans ce livre deux textes simplement alternés ; il pourrait presque sembler qu'ils n'ont rien en commun, mais ils sont pourtant inextricablement enchevêtrés, comme si aucun des deux ne pouvait exister seul, comme si de leur rencontre seule, de cette lumière lointaine qu'ils jettent l'un sur l'autre, pouvait se révéler ce qui n'est jamais tout à fait dit dans l'un, jamais tout à fait dit dans l'autre, mais seulement dans leur fragile intersection.L'un de ces textes appartient tout entier à l'imaginaire : c'est un roman d'aventures, la reconstitution, arbitraire mais minutieuse, d'un fantasme enfantin évoquant une cité régie par l'idéal olympique. L'autre texte est une autobiographie : le récit fragmentaire d'une vie d'enfant pendant la guerre, un récit pauvre d'exploits et de souvenirs, fait de bribes éparses, d'absences, d'oublis, de doutes, d'hypothèses, d'anecdotes maigres. Le récit d'aventures, à côté, a quelque chose de grandiose, ou peut-être de suspect. Car il commence par raconter une histoire et, d'un seul coup, se lance dans une autre : dans cette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le récit autour d'on ne sait quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d'où est sorti ce livre, ces points de suspension auxquels se sont accrochés les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'écriture."Georges Perec.
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La Vie Mode D'emploi
La Vie mode d'emploi est un livre extraordinaire, d'une importance capitale non seulement dans la création de l'auteur, mais dans notre littérature, par son ampleur, son organisation, la richesse de ses informations, la cocasserie de ses inventions, par l'ironie qui le travaille de bout en bout sans en chasser la tendresse, par sa forme d'art enfin : un réalisme baroque qui confine au burlesque.
Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde.L'ironie, très douce, imperceptible, fantomatique, moirée, faite d'un détachement extrême, d'une méticulosité et d'une patience qui deviennent de l'amour... En résumé, c'est un prodigieux livre-brocante, qu'on visite sans se presser, à la fois livre fourre-tout, livre promenade.
Jacques-Pierre Amette, Le Point.Et cela donne des romans exotiques, extravagants, des crimes parfaits, des fables érudites, des catalogues, des affaires de moeurs, de sombres histoires de magie noire, des confidences de coureurs cyclistes... Jeux de miroirs et tables gigognes, entrez dans cet immeuble et vous ferez le tour du monde. Un vertige majuscule. Quand on en sort, on est léger comme une montgolfière.
Catherine David, Le Nouvel Observateur.
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Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
“One of the most significant literary personalities in the world.”—Italo Calvino
Georges Perec, author of the highly acclaimed Life: A User’s Manual, was only forty-six when he died in 1982. Despite a tragic childhood, during which his mother was deported to Auschwitz, Perec produced some of the most entertaining essays of the age. His literary output was deliberately varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec’s non-fictional work, the first to appear in English, demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humor, and accessibility.
As he contemplates the many ways in which we occupy the space around us, as he depicts the commonplace items with which we are familiar in a startling, engrossing way, as he recounts his psychoanalysis while remaining reticent about his feelings or depicts the Paris of his childhood without a trace of sentimentality, we become aware that we are in the presence of a remarkable, virtuoso writer.
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A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go
by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Lusson
An introduction to the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go by Oulipo members Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud
Written by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics.
As in the Oulipian strategy of writing under constraint, the role of structured gameplay (within literature and without) proves to be of primordial importance: a means of moving outside an inherent system, of instigating new figures of style and meaning, new paths toward collaboration and new strategies for filling a space: be it the space of a terrain, a blank page, a white screen or a freshly stretched canvas.
Translated for the first time, this treatise outlines the history of Go, the rules for playing it, some central tactics and strategies for playing it and overcoming the threats posed by an opponent, general information and trivia, and a glossary that ranges from Atari (check) to Yose (the end of a match).
Pierre Lusson (born 1950) is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France.
Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.”
Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of mathematics at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart and The Loop.
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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.” –Ian Klaus, CityLab
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
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Three by Perec (Verba Mundi (Paperback))
Three works of short fiction by Georges Perec. “One of the most singular literary personalities in the world.”―Italo Calvino
Georges Perec’s mastery of absurdist fiction are on full display in this collection. As Richard Eder in The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Perec’s artistry has achieved a perfect balance between allure and imponderability.”
The novella The Exeter Text contains all those e’s that were omitted from his novel, A Void (Perec hated waste) and no other vowel. In Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard? we meet Sergeant Henri Pollak and his vehicle that carries him between Vincennes and Montparnasse. A Gallery Portrait is about a portrait, called “A Gallery Portrait,” of the Pittsburgh beer baron Hermann Raffke sitting in front of his portrait which depicts Raffke sitting in front of his portrait.
Mind-bending short fiction from a 20th century master.
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Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere
Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazzling effect in such works as A Void—a murder mystery that contains nary an “e”—and Life A User’s Manual, in which an apartment building, systematically canvassed, unfolds secrets and, ultimately offers a reflection on creation, destruction, and the devotion to art.
Before embarking on these experiments, however, Perec tried his hand at a relatively straightforward novel, Portrait of a Man. His first book, it was rejected by publishers when he submitted it in 1960, after which he filed it away. Decades after Perec’s death, David Bellos discovered the manuscript, and through his translation we have a chance to enjoy it in English for the first time. What fans will find here is a thriller that combines themes that would remain prominent in Perec’s later work, such as art forgery, authenticity, and murder, as well as craftsman Gaspard Winckler, who whose namesakes play major roles in Life A User’s Manual and W or The Memory of Childhood.
Engaging and entertaining on its own merits, and gaining additional interest when set in the context of Perec’s career, Portrait of a Man is sure to charm the many fans of this postmodern master.
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Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere
Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazzling effect in such works as A Void—a murder mystery that contains nary an “e”—and Life A User’s Manual, in which an apartment building, systematically canvassed, unfolds secrets and, ultimately offers a reflection on creation, destruction, and the devotion to art.
Before embarking on these experiments, however, Perec tried his hand at a relatively straightforward novel, Portrait of a Man. His first book, it was rejected by publishers when he submitted it in 1960, after which he filed it away. Decades after Perec’s death, David Bellos discovered the manuscript, and through his translation we have a chance to enjoy it in English for the first time. What fans will find here is a thriller that combines themes that would remain prominent in Perec’s later work, such as art forgery, authenticity, and murder, as well as craftsman Gaspard Winckler, who whose namesakes play major roles in Life A User’s Manual and W or The Memory of Childhood.
Engaging and entertaining on its own merits, and gaining additional interest when set in the context of Perec’s career, Portrait of a Man is sure to charm the many fans of this postmodern master.
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Georges Perec and the Oulipo: Winter Journeys (Atlas Anti-classics)
In 1979, Georges Perec (1936–1982) wrote a brief entertainment called “The Winter Journey” for a publisher’s catalogue. It quickly became his most frequently reprinted short story. Set on the eve of World War II, it recounts the discovery of a great literary masterpiece that conceals a scandalous secret at the heart of the whole of modern French literature. Every aspect of literary history will have to be rewritten. However, the War intervenes, and the work is lost forever. The present volume, a kind of “hyper-novel,” includes and then extends this brief parable, which turns out to be so resonant with possibilities. Georges Perec was perhaps the most celebrated member of the Oulipo group of writers in France, and over the years members of the group have written 20 sequels to this tale, between 1992 and January of this year. The result is a novel of digressions, gradual elaboration and bizarre forays into the totally unexpected. Winter Journeys has become one of the most extended and congenial literary experiments of recent times; it includes meditations on the literary tastes of worms, book-burning in the Nazi period, the delights of plagiarism and the twisted rationality of bibliophilia. First published as a limited paperback edition in 2001, this new volume is twice the length of its predecessor. Please note that pages 136-140 are intentionally printed upside down, as part of the narrative on those pages (François Caradec's "The Worm's Journey," which describes a bookworm's path through a book).
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53 Days
A puzzling mystery and the last, unfinished work by Georges Perec―a writer Italo Calvino called, ”One of the most singular literary personalities in the world.” The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime-writer Robert Serval, who has mysteriously disappeared. Serval has left behind the manuscript of his last, unfinished novel, which may contain clues to his fate.
Before his death, Perec completed 11 of a planned 28 chapters but left extensive drafts and notes for his friends and frequent collaborators, Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud. The two assembled the unfinished mystery and, through notes, provide a fascinating view into the author's mind as he fashioned his literary labyrinth of mirror-stories.
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Life: A User's Manual
“One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.”―Boston Globe
Structured around a single moment in time ― 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 ― Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary.
From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User’s Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.
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Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep (Verba Mundi (Paperback))
Two thematically-related novellas by Georges Perec in one volume. In each, Perec probes our obsession with society’s trappings―the seductive mass of things that masquerade as stability and meaning.
In Things: A Story of the Sixties, Jerome and Sylvie, a young, upwardly mobile couple lust for the good life, caught between the fantasy of “the film they would have liked to live” and the reality of life’s daily mundanities.
The nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs “to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep.” Yearning to exist on neutral ground as “a blessed parenthesis,” he discovers something unexpected.
With the American publication of Life: A User’s Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was recognized in the United States as one of this century’s most innovative writers. Things: A Story of the Sixties is accessible, sobering, and deeply involving. Each novel distills Perec’s unerring grasp of the human condition and displays his rare comic talent, detachment, and compassion.
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Thoughts of Sorts (Verba Mundi (Paperback))
A collection of essays by an aburdist master attempting to define the ways we define our place in the world.
Georges Perec investigates his experience of the world through listmaking, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and at the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical / atypical Perec fashion.
Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec’s final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985.
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