Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
, Trans. by David Bellos, The Harvill Press, 1996."This marvellous book is one of the most ingenious works of modern fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of ever more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime..."
"Though Perec (1936-1982) is "experimental" in the tradition of Joyce and Nabokov, his work is rich with word games and acrostics that reveal the secret life of language this euphoric novel, winner of the Prix Medicis, will enchant a range of readers. The serial storytelling within the framework narrative is as beguiling and inexhaustible as Scheherazade's. The facade is removed from a Parisian apartment house on the Rue Simon-Crubellier, permitting us to spy on its tenants in the grid of rooms and to examine their pictures and bibelots. Books, letters, clippings and announcements add to the textual welter, all interlocking like pieces of a puzzle, the novel's chief metaphor. Tales told in stylishly reinvented genres, romance, detection, adventure, constitute what is experienced, read about or dreamed up by an array of restaurateurs, mediums, cyclists, antique dealers and pious widows. A quester for the Nile tries to rescue a beautiful German girl from a harem. A judge's wife, whose sexually thrilling thefts result in a sentence of hard labor, ends as a bag lady on a park bench. Meanwhile a team of eccentric artists, Bartlebooth, Winckler and Valene, enact the creative process, painting watercolor seascapes, cutting them apart with a jigsaw and reassembling them as smoothly as "an oily sea closing over a drowning man." The image of a splendidly wrought table, its interior fretted by patient worms, succinctly and differently restates the process. This is a classic of contemporary fiction." - Publishers Weekly
"The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work," begins Perec's encyclopedic novel, which details everything, animate and inamimate, in an imaginary apartment house. His characters unfailingly do the least expected: Laurelle, killed at her own wedding by a falling chandelier; Ingeborn, who casts a white actor as Otello; Gregoire, fired from a vegetarian restaurant for pouring beef extract in the vegetable soup; a judge's wife sentenced to hard labor. The author reserves the greatest irony for Percival Bartlebooth, like himself an artist. Bartlebooth paints watercolors that are made into jigsaw puzzles, then reverses the process until he has a perfectly blank sheet. Creation and dissolution are the themes in this highly entertaining work, itself a puzzle." - Lisa Mullenneaux
"What makes it ultimately so moving and lovable is that, though it fails (as it was meant to fail) as a user's manual to life (...) this world of things remains, secure and serene in its unquenchable thereness. Three cheers (...) for David Bellos' heroic translation." - Gilbert Adair
"What draws one into this book is not Perec's cleverness, but the deftness and clarity of his style. (...) (A)part from a number of small lapses here and there, David Bellos seems to have done an admirable job. (...) [Perec] is not a writer who will appeal to everyone, but those who have a taste for the unusual, for books that create worlds unto themselves, will be dazzled by this crazy-quilt monument to the imagination." - Paul Auster
"From the most straitened (and self-imposed) circumstances, Perec spins forth an infinite variety of entertainments, hundreds of tales, anecdotes, puzzles, mysteries, conundrums and diversions. Do the glittering pieces add up to a radiant whole? While the fun proceeds, this question seems irrelevant. At the end, it teases and haunts." - Paul Gray
"A great book, rather than a merely brilliant one (.....) How sad then to have to say that the book has been translated and edited extremely carelessly." - Gabriel Josipovici
"Life: A User's Manual is very much the consummation of his achievement, bringing together stories and characters from much of his previous writing, and continually alluding to those writers who define the fictional space in which Perec's texts also aspire to move." - Mark Ford
"Furniture, shoe laces, dust bins, a romance, a crime, a hand reaching out for a newspaper, are told of in equal and apparently dispassionate detail. Yet bit by bit, a universe of colors and emotions, of human stirrings and failures is created. Time moves them all, and Perec's masterpiece manages to make time palpable, fragrant and sad." - Richard Eder
"What is for me the most memorable novel of the last fifty years, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, is endlessly valuable because of its infinite promise: Perec invented a Parisian apartment block and bisected it, as if it were a doll's house, to describe lives that might have been lived in every one of its hundred rooms. The book's construction depends on an elaborate pattern, but its central brilliance is trick-free: Paris 1975, a particular building with cellars and garrets and stairways and salons and endless particular clutter." - Daniel Soar
"Seldom you come across a book which is so magnificent in its scope, so disarmingly rich in style and variation, that after finishing it, you feel quite numb and dull. And later, when you try to reflect on the book, you are desperately short of words and expressions. Common examples include James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”.
Recently, I’ve finished reading “Life: A User’s Manual” by Georges Perec and without hesitation, I’ve placed it in the aforementioned category.
I’m supposed to call “Life: A User’s Manual” a book, or a novel, but I prefer the word ‘tapestry’, and indeed, it is an ingenuous one. The title page describes it as “Novels”, in plural, and we’ll understand its significance a little later. The central character of the narrative is a wealthy Englishman called Bartlebooth (recently I've come to know that this is a cross between Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Valery Larbaud’s Barnabooth; such tongue-in-cheek references are abundant in this piece of work) living in a Parisian apartment at 11, Rue Simon-Crubellier. Not knowing what to do with his time or his fortune, he contrives an extensive plan which will keep him busy for the rest of his life. His plan goes as follows—
•In the first 10 years he devotes himself learning the techniques of water-colour under the guidance of Valene, who also comes to live at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.
•Then, he starts his voyage spanning a period of 20 years around the world, accompanied by his faithful butler Smautf (an obvious reference to Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”, bringing back the sweet memories of my childhood days) and painting 500 landscapes in different ports in different countries.
•As soon as he finishes each of these canvases, it is sent to Gaspard Winckler, a clever and ingenuous craftsman (another resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier) who converts it into a jigsaw puzzle, increasingly difficult in nature, and stores them for future.
•After returning from his voyage, Bartlebooth solves those jigsaw puzzles.
•Each of the solved puzzles is then transferred to Georges Morellet (still another resident of the same building) who then rebinds the paper with a special glue and restores the original painting, removing the support of the pasteboard.
•This painting, which is in almost the identical state when Bartlebooth painted it, is then sent to the port where it was painted, exactly 20 years after the day of its creation.
•The painting is then placed into seawater until the colour dissolves, leaving a plain virgin sheet of paper.
•This blank sheet is then returned to Bartlebooth.
•The whole process is repeated for all the 500 paintings.
Now, as the narrative progresses, it dawns upon the readers that the novel is set not only on the day of Bartlebooth’s death, but also, at the precise moment of his death. All the characters and objects, living in the microcosm of this Parisian apartment, are frozen in time and space by the author as he goes on painstakingly describing each of them, in each of the flats in the building, where they are and what they have been doing at that fateful moment, with elaborate references to their past, present and future. And this act of describing them is actually what the novel consists of. Probably now, the word “novels” makes some sense, because in the course of this narrative, we’ve come across more than 100 main stories (concerning all the residents and their lives), spanning almost 142 years (1833-1975).
But, what is the point of telling such a convoluted array of stories? And, moreover, what is the point of indulging oneself into such a tedious and futile endeavour like Bartlebooth? The answers are the same—NOTHING!
The most striking characteristic of this tapestry is its capability of referring to itself and its elements. The book itself is in the fashion of a vast jigsaw puzzle, similar to the ones Bartlebooth has been solving throughout his life. All the different stories and characters are the random pieces of the puzzle. As you are going through them, you engage yourself in joining them together, groping around in dark, unsure of yourself. Eventually, at the end, this tapestry emerges with full splendour.
The quixotic effort of Bartlebooth and that of the author touch upon yet another theme. However hard a person tries to attribute a meaning to an act, ultimately it is devoid of any significance, or rather, if it has any significance at all, that is purely random (remember Sassure’s “Signifier - Signified” duo which is random). We are nothing but preys of an illusory meaningfulness which we pursue till the end of our lives. The effort of both Bartlebooth and Perec is a mockery of this illusion. At the end, Bartlebooth dies without finishing the project, in the process of becoming aware of the impossibility of such a task.
While Bartlebooth’s bizarre project provides the central theme, 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier gives the book its structure. Supposedly, the narrative moves like a Knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to them). Perec haults in each room and tells us about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about some of their acquaintances. Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10×10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics and 10 rooms across, including 2 for the stairwell (the plan is given at the end of the book, along with a 58 pages long Index!). Each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight's moves on the grid.
George Perec was a member of the OuLiPo ("Ouvroir de littérature potentielle", which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature") group. The members of the group were devoted to “constrained writing” techniques (Perec himself wrote an entire book without using the vowel e for once). In this novel also, there are certain constraints that he subjects himself to, like the number of lists in each chapter, number of objects etc. Unfortunately, as an uninitiated reader, I couldn’t delve deep into such numerological nitty-gritty.
The book swarms with numerous references to other authors, books and characters, including Jules Verne, Captain Nemo, Passepartout, Kafka, Nabokov, Gaston Leroux, Cheri-Bibi, Marcel Proust and so on. As a novice reader it is an unpardonable audacity to even think of uncovering all those subtle nuances, but if you can, at least, sneak a peek at some of them, you will be justly rewarded. But be careful, there are plenty of red herrings, which may soon thwart you off the track.
Another nasty twist at the end of this post! It is not Perec, who is describing all these disparate elements of a story. Rather, he is just describing the concept behind an unfinished sketch by Valene (the art teacher of our old friend Bartlebooth), aspiring to depict the building and its residents in fullest possible details (yes, along with the incidents from their past lives). Valene stops working on this painting precisely at the moment of Bartlebooth’s death!
What should be said about this one-of-its-kind book, if not diabolic?" - Souva Chattopadhyay
"Life A User's Manual is probably the work Georges Perec is best known for. His biggest tome and most complex creation, it has generally been acknowledged as a modern masterpiece (and was, for example, selected as "Novel of the Decade" by Salon du Livre).
Georges Perec was a tremendously playful writer, in all senses of the word. He was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle - the "Workshop for Potential Literature") from 1967 onwards, and he reveled in the word games and literary restrictions the group studied and applied to their writings (in his biography of Perec (see our review), David Bellos describes the group as beginning as one "intent on the further study of (...) the overlap between, or intersection of, mathematics and poetry"). Perec had famously written a book without the letter "e" (La disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void), created the world's longest palindrome (earning him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records) and, starting in 1976, was the crossword-puzzle setter for Le Point. More than most authors and word-lovers he twisted language and subjected it to the most rigid rules - and managed to create marvelous things with it.
No Perec text is entirely straightforward, but his writing is not all merely fun and games. Things and W or The Memory of Childhood are just two of his many varied texts that show that his methods could readily lead to what can be considered fairly mainstream results.
Life A User's Manual, dedicated to OuLiPo's guiding light Raymond Queneau, combines all of the best of Georges Perec. In effect, it does combine all of Perec's approaches, games, and themes, and the result is quite extraordinary. It is a novel, a collection of many short stories, and an example of countless literary games. More than most books it defies (or at least poses an enormous challenge to) any effort at translation, but David Bellos has managed to render it into English without losing all too much of what Perec has done. Much has inevitably gone by the wayside, but Bellos' book does justice to what Perec set out to do and is an excellent book in its own right.
Told in six parts and ninety-nine chapters, plus a preamble and an epilogue, the novel also comes with three appendices - a useful index, a chronology, and an "Alphabetical Checklist of Some of the Stories Narrated in this Manual". It begins with a jigsaw puzzle, and in fact the whole novel is a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that can stand on their own but that also fit together in a larger design. Jigsaw puzzles also figure prominently in the text, as one of the characters, Percival Bartlebooth (a name that Bellos describes as a being a combination of Valery Larbaud's A. O. Barnabooth and Melville's Bartleby) spends half his life painting pictures that he has someone mount and cut into jigsaw puzzles, in order for him to spend the second half of his life reassembling these puzzles (an idea that ultimately does not go exactly as intended, of course).
Life A User's Manual centers around a building (11 rue Simon-Crubellier) and its inhabitants, the narrative jumping around according to a grid design (explained in David Bellos' Georges Perec). Each has a story, and many of the stories naturally overlap. Perec complicates matters further by playing different stylistic games throughout the novel, imposing constraints that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not (and sometimes don't quite make the jump from French to English). There are also quotations woven into the text from numerous authors, including Borges, Butor, Melville, Harry Mathews, Nabokov, Stendhal, Jules Verne - and Georges Perec.
Life A User's Manual is a huge, ambitious book (and the English version is already a very different beast than Perec's actual La Vie mode d'emploi). It is not easily described (an exegesis would probably cover several volumes of similar length), and it is probably not to everyone's taste, but for those who like serious fun in their reading matter Life A User's Manual is emphatically recommended." - The Complete Review
"Life: A User's Manual begins with a meditation on jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles? Indeed, jigsaw puzzles. It is preceded by a motto from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, that could equally well serve as the motto for my research into dance and perception: "The eyes follow the paths that have been laid down for it in the work."
Georges Perec varies on this motto when, at the end of the preamble he observes the following truth about jigsaw puzzles: "despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle maker has made before; evey piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other."
With this the tone of the book has been set, because the whole novel can be seen as an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Every story, every piece stands on its own but also fits into the larger design of the novel as a whole. As a matter of fact the tone of the book had already been set by the motto that precedes the novel, "Look with all your eyes, look", a seemingly innocent line from Jules Vernes Michael Strogoff.
But in the universe of Georges Perec everything is what it is, but nothing is what it seems. There’s always the twist of fate, the chance encounter and the hidden meaning.
In Jules Vernes's novel, Michael Strogoff is told to keep his eyes open and look at the world around him, the moment when he has been umasked by the Tartars as a spy for the czar and just before he is blinded with the glowing blade of a sword.
Life A User's Manual is a book for readers, and the more you have read the more you will appreciate the subtle references to other novels and popular culture. But to say so would do unjustice to a book that is quite simply a marvel to read.
Life A User's Manual tells the story of a ten storied building, in the fictional 11, rue Simon-Crubellier, in Paris, minutely describing its interior and how it relates to the lives of those who lived there, but most of all it tells the stories, 179 in total, of its inhabitants. The order in which the different stories are told, is determined by a famous chess problem: how to visit every spot on the board using only the knight’s move. It is but one of many formal constraints that shape Life A User's Manual. Perec reputedly spent three years working out all the rules that govern every chapter and the patchwork they constitute. But don’t expect a formal or formalist book, for Life A User's Manual’s greatest gift is the affection with which it portrays its characters.
If there is a central character in this kaleidoscope of stories it is probably the fabulously wealthy Percival Bartlebooth, a name which no doubt resounds Melville's Bartleby. Bartlebooth argues to himself that if he is not to realize at a later age that all his life has been meaningless, he would do best to incorporate this meaninglessness into his life. And so one day he decides to take up lessons in painting watercolors with Serge Valène, who also lives at 11, rue Simon-Crubellier.
After 10 years he sets out on a journey around the world to paint watercolors of 500 different harbors and seaports, a journey which will take him another 20 years. Every other week he visits another town and every other week he sends a watercolor to his assistant Gaspard Winckler, who glues the paintings on a wooden board and makes them into a jigsaw puzzle of 750 pieces each.
In 1955, having finished all 500 watercolors, Bartlebooth returns home and begins to solve the puzzles. Once put together the puzzles are to be resolved from their backing and taken to where they were painted, where they are to be erased with some detergent. Bartlebooth will thus be left with what he started with, an empty sheet of paper. Beginning and end would coincide. But things don’t go as planned.
To revenge himself for 20 years of pointless work, Gaspard Winckler has made the jigsaw puzzles ever more difficult. Almost blind Bartlebooth dies as he haphazardly attempts to finish the 439th puzzle. As Perec writes in the last paragraph of the 99th chapter, a paragraph that brings me near tears whenever I reread it:
''It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o'clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.''
Gaspard Winckler who died two years earlier has triumphed, but it has been a meaningless triumph.
Bartlebooth’s project is the most grotesque failure in Life A User's Manual, but at the end of their life every character seems to realize that his life has been meaningless, that his efforts were futile, that he has spent a life building castles in the air, making plans that were unrealistic from the outset on, or that life in the form of chance has at some point intervened.
The book is told by Serge Valène who has lived in the building for over 55 years and who in the final months of his life "conceived the idea of a painting that would reassemble his entire existence: everything his memory had recorded, all the sensations that had swept over him, all his fantasies, his passions, his hates would be recorded on canvas, a compendium of minute parts of which the sum would be his life."
In the epilogue we learn that a few weeks after Bartlebooth Valène has died, leaving behind an almost blank canvas: "a few charcoal lines had been carefully drawn, dividing it up into regular square boxes, the sketch of a cross-section of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit." - Ivar Hagendoorn
"Outside his native France, Novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) was known chiefly as a member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes. And four years before he died of cancer, Perec published La Vie Mode d'Emploi, a novel that French critics have increasingly hailed as a masterpiece.
Some skepticism may be permissible. The Gallic taste for abstractions and literary fun and games is not universally shared. And wordplay, no matter how winsome, does not travel well from one language to another. In any case, English-speaking readers can now examine Perec's most acclaimed book for themselves. At first glance, Life: A User's Manual looks every bit as good as the French have been saying it is for years.
This despite a number of intentional difficulties that ought to make the work unreadable. The setting is a capacious apartment house in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris. Each of Perec's 99 chapters takes place in a different room or locale in the building. Scrupulous attention is paid to the furnishings, wallpaper, paintings, knickknacks and impedimenta in each new scene. The time is shortly before 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. That is when the action begins and when it ends. In other words, this book has no forward movement, no fundamental plot at all.
What it possesses instead is the slow, hypnotic fascination of an enormous puzzle being assembled piece by piece. Perec makes his jigsaw methods quite explicit. One of the residents in the apartment house is a wealthy Englishman named Percival Bartlebooth, whose past, along with those of dozens of other tenants, gradually emerges. In 1925, Bartlebooth embarks on the rigid program he has mapped out for the rest of his life. He spends ten years learning how to paint watercolors. For the next 20 years he travels the globe, rendering one seaport scene roughly every two weeks and sending each painting to Paris, where a craftsman turns the artwork into a jigsaw puzzle. From 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, back in his apartment, solves each puzzle and then has the reassembled watercolor shipped to its place of origin, where it is erased. The beauty of Bartlebooth's life's work is its rigorous uselessness: "starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, Bartlebooth would end up with nothing."
Given the fascinating eccentricities that crop up on nearly every page of this novel, Bartlebooth's plan seems almost humdrum. From the most straitened (and self-imposed) circumstances, Perec spins forth an infinite variety of entertainments, hundreds of tales, anecdotes, puzzles, mysteries, conundrums and diversions. Do the glittering pieces add up to a radiant whole? While the fun proceeds, this question seems irrelevant. At the end, it teases and haunts." - Paul Gray
Frances Evangelista: "life a user's manual by georges perec: initial thoughts"
Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
"Long neglected by English-speaking scholars and Perec devotees for the author's other, more flamboyant endeavors, An Attempt... has remained a kind of secret treasure for those interested in Oulipo- and Situationist-inspired tracts of Paris. Marvelously simple and deceptively well-designed, Perec's slim volume presents itself as an artifact of the street, ushering the reader into a spontaneous phenomenology of words, conventional symbols, numbers, fleeting slogans, trajectories, colors, and, as he more technically describes them, means of locomotion, means of carrying, means of traction, degrees of determination or motivation, and body positions." - Erik Morse
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Trans. by John Sturrock, Penguin Classics, 2008.
"(A) well-judged selection of the occasional writings of the performing flea of modern French literature." - David Coward
"Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is a collection of Perec's "non-fictional and occasional writings". They span essentially his entire writing career (the earliest is a transcript from remarks from 1959), and include interviews, essays, fiction, and some of his puzzles.
Perec's 1974 book, Species of Spaces (Espèces d'espaces), is presented in its entirety, taking up about a third of this volume. No single work by Perec can be called typical, but this one comes fairly close to being a representative work. Its subject is - spaces. Or, as Perec puts it in his foreword: "The subject of this book is not the void exactly, but rather what there is round about or inside it".
Perec begins with some introductory material offering variations on the theme, then proceeds from space to space. The first is the ultimate authorial space: the page, first blank and then filled. From there he goes from bed to bedroom to apartment to building to street to town to country(side) to countries to continents to world to... space.
His observations, ruminations ("We don't think enough of staircases"), asides ("I write in the margin", he writes in the margin), quotes, and longer expositions really pierce all these spatial concepts. The presentation varies from experimental to straightforward description to lists, from fanciful to ultra-realistic. What Perec manages to do is present all the facets of the mundane: his writing here is like those representations of three-dimensional figures on a computer screen, slowly turning to present unexpected sides - a simple and yet still surprising trick. Lots of it, of course, also turns out not to be so mundane.
Much of this material is also personal (like much of the material in this collection), bringing the author himself closer. And in the section on "The Apartment Building" Perec offers a "Project for a Novel" - an introduction to Life A User's Manual (see our review).
The selections from Je suis né are directly autobiographical. The first piece presented here, the title piece ("I was born") begins:
I was born on 7.3.36. How many dozens, how many hundreds of times have I written that sentence ? I've no idea.
Autobiography - and self-analysis, in all senses - are a preoccupation for Perec, constantly repeated, whether in writing "I was born on 7.3.36" over and over or repeating other details (from the same or from varying points of view). His life doesn't always figure at the forefront of his fiction (or his work generally), but it is almost always part of it, on some level. The pieces in this section offer glimpses at parts of his life, from his parachuting experiences to a story of running away from home in his childhood to a list of "Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die".
In other sections there are other attempts to classify, survey, set fast: from a piece on the objects on his desk to an attempted inventory of what he ate and drink during the year 1974. Perec also looks outward (though taking a similar approach), in more general pieces such as "Think/Classify", "The Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books", and "Reading: A Socio-Physiological Outline".
The book also offers the marvelous little literary story, The Winter Journey, a clever book-tale (frequently - and fairly - compared to Borges' fiction).
Finally, Sturrock has a go at presenting Perec's New Year's puzzles - verbal games which he devised for his friends, which Sturrock notes were: "of a generally daunting if not impenetrable ingenuity." They are essentially impossible to translate, but Sturrock at least tries to give an idea of what they are like (and even offers three of his own examples). Sturrock's translations (and examples) fall a bit flat, but he does at least give English-language readers an idea of what Perec did.
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is an excellent introduction to Perec's work. It is a Perec-reader that offers a bit of most everything that Perec did, and considerable insight into the man himself. The greatest regret a reader will have is that these are only selections, and that so much of his work remains untranslated.
Certainly recommended." - The Complete Review
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood, Trans. by David Bellos, David R Godine, 2010.
"From the author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Nazi occupation of France.
Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's 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. . .[with] no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, rape common, stealing encouraged and violence a fact of life.
Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those "shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores?"?How did this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?
This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?"
"Exploring a single letter was one among many devices used by Perec ( Life: A User's Manual ), known for his verbal feats. "W" (pronounced in French double-ve ) suggests the double sorrow (the poetic Weh in German) arising from the parallel and interlaced narratives of this quasi-autobiographical novel. Born in Paris of Jewish emigre parents who were killed when he was a child, Perec actually had "no childhood memories," and so invented a personal past based on photographs and the testimony of relatives. The novel alternates a straightforward account of childhood with an imagined journey to a fiendish utopia, i.e., Nazi Germany, whose criminal ideal of Olympic Sport controls every act. Boys train as athletes, while girls become handmaids and, in the big playoff, the champions' rape victims. The regime's mirror-image is found in the Nazi's organized death camps. Common threads link the novel's two narratives. Perec's schooldays evoke the athletes' horrifying education. "W" is the name of the Olympic police state; "W" recurs in the herringbone pattern of Perec's skis, and when repeated and re-aligned forms a Star of David. The writer's search for identity within a historic nightmare provides a moving and important memoir." - Publishers Weekly
"The W here is "double ve (vie)," a pun on "double life," and Perec (1936-82) offers two narratives in this 1975 novel: Recollections of an early childhood (like his own) as a Jew during the German occupation of France alternate with the description of a Fascist, sports-crazed regime on an island in Tierra del Fuego. The second narrative is presumably the creation of the first narrator, a pacifist carrying a Swiss passport originally issued to an autistic adolescent possibly abandoned in Tierra del Fuego. The "real" story is conscientiously tentative in its reconstruction; the "imaginary" story is elaborately and unequivocally detailed. The unmistakably British translation in no way detracts from its impact." - Marilyn Gaddis Rose
Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, Trans. by David Bellos, David R Godine, 2010.
"With the American publication of Life, a User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was immediately recognized in the U.S. as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.
Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.
In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, 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 that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.
Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate."
"Two intriguing and poignant novellas, Perec's first published works, show him forging the iconoclastic literary style that fully emerges in his magisterial Life: A User's Manual -the technique of crowding fictional space with an almost rococo wealth of detail and decor. Things (1965) coolly pinpoints the yearnings and malaise of young Jerome and Sylvie, market researchers who analyze their interviewees' needs just as Perec inventories their own. Media slogans and trendy magazines dictate the luxuries they would buy if they had money. To escape the consumerist mythology, they move to Sfax, a drab desert outpost in Tunisia. But although they locate a beautiful villa, their dream eludes them. The narrative slips into future tense: "They will pine for Paris," go back and recall Sfax with nostalgia. In A Man Asleep (the basis of a 1973 award-winning film), an introspective graduate school dropout denies the pressures of time, first by examining each instant as he lies in bed, then by drifting through Paris streets in an imitation of sleep's shadowy oblivion. Despite his characters' trapped, "decelerating" lives, Perec's fertile imagination is fresh and surprising." - Publishers Weekly
"Things speaks for the bourgeois, mass-market Sixties just as, eighty years earlier, Huysmans's A Rebours became the Bible of the Decadents. To move from Huysmans to Perec is to go from the gaslit naughtiness of a Late Victorian brothel to the antiseptic pages of a soft-porn magazine." - Partrick Parrinder
"(T)he author is not simply lampooning Jerome's and Sylvie's dream-maneuvers. He writes with a ghost of tenderness. It is detached tenderness, like that of an archeologist who uncovers the ruins of a great city. That they are ruins, he has no doubt; that the city was beautiful is not affirmed, exactly, but offered as a troubled hypothesis." - Richard Eder
"Ein leicht lesbarer, aber schwer verdaubarer Text, dessen Gift langsam wirkt, wie es bei aller wahren Kunst der Fall ist - bevor auch sie zum schicken Titel eines Werks wird, das sich jeder an die Wand hängen oder in den Bücherschrank stellen muss." - Stefan Zweifel
"Perec's accomplishment in Things is obvious if modest. (...) The work does lack a certain amount of emotional impact since it reads so much like a case study, but I assume Perec realized what he was doing." - Harvey Pekar
"Things is a semi-autobiographical two-part novella, centered on the lives of Jérôme and Sylvie. Disillusioned students, they dropped out and took positions in the new, fast-expanding field of market research. They don't really imagine these jobs leading to careers, but see them as a stepping-stone, allowing them some independence, and better than the other limited alternatives they have.
Once employed they begin to enjoy consumer-life. Not only do they research it, they also avidly partake in it. They become quite swept up in the vicious circle of consumerism, which in turn ties them to their jobs (they aren't qualified to do much else), desperate to live the lifestyles being promoted and offered around them. Eventually they find: "Money, sometimes, consumed them entirely."
They don't entirely give in: they do try the alternative. The first, stand-alone sentence of Part II of the novel acknowledges: "They tried to run away" (their eventual failure already implicit in these words).
They apply for teaching positions, in Tunisia - a touch of the exotic, away from what has become their oppressive Parisian lives, politically seemingly engaged (with the Algerian hotbed - it is 1962 - so close). They go, and live a different life there. But it can not hold them, and though not yet a fait accompli the narrator can write with certainty of what will come: they will return to France, settle down, accept positions in advertising.
Perec presents the story with almost clinical directness. The focus is almost entirely on the one unit the couple form: everything is seen in relationship to them, almost every sentence talks about "them" and what "they" do. They are part of the world - tiny cogs, as they all too well recognize - but the world at large only touches them to the extent they allow it to. Algeria and France's involvement there looms like a shadow over all of France: it does not go unmentioned here, but is almost entirely peripheral.
In the Epilogue Perec switches tenses, offering not what has happened or is happening but looking ahead. "Things could have carried on in the same way", is the first sentence of this section. Of course, they will not. Instead, Perec states that Jérôme and Sylvie will clearly not remain in this stasis, but rather will choose the life they had briefly tried to escape, settling down into the yuppiedom of the 1960s. He closes by sketching out their inevitable future, vague regrets and all.
The book ends with a quote from Marx, suggesting the means are as significant as the ends and that "the quest for truth must itself be true". Jérôme and Sylvie's quest itself, Perec suggests throughout, lacks that necessary purity.
Things is the story of a generation - not the 68ers (another popular French preoccupation), but those a few years older. It is a novel of the sixties - a world unsettled by Algeria and De Gaulle, but soon to be thrown into even greater turmoil. The rise of consumerism, and both the attraction and emptiness of this lifestyle are fully explored, as are the other dramatic changes society at that time was going through.
Perec presents his story well and very effectively. He writes in part from experience: he did dabble in market research, and he did spend some time in Tunisian Sfax (as do his characters). Perec, of course, chose a different way - working as a research archivist and always writing - but he shows an understanding of the motivations and longings of his characters (and the many they are stand-ins for) and conveys these very well.
A small, odd (but very approachable) modern French classic, allowing for a variety of interpretations - and good literary fun. Recommended." - The Complete Review
"A Man Asleep is told in the second person, directed straight at the reader, insistently speaking for him (the "you" is, as the title already suggests, male - which, one might argue, somewhat limits the effectiveness of this particularly literary device).
The "you" is also clearly the author, writing as though he were another, picking apart his own life from outside rather than from within.
He ("you") is a twenty-five year old student, living in Paris, suddenly overcome by the pointlessness of it all: "You have hardly started living, and yet all is said, all is done." He decides to withdraw from life, simply not accepting the inevitable, mundane path that has been mapped-out for him - indeed, not accepting any future. It begins when he sleeps through an exam, the first step to his abandoning his studies:
Your seat remains vacant. You won't finish your degree, you won't begin a postgraduate thesis. You will study no more.
He doesn't answer the door or see his friends, cutting himself off from his old life. He simply drifts, realizing that: "you don't know how to live, that you will never know." He doesn't seem to want to learn, either, simply allowing himself to drift.
He stays with his parents in the country for a few months, lazing away. He returns to Paris, to his garret: "the centre of the world" - his limited world, certainly. Almost: the entirety of his world.
He practically sleepwalks through life. He wanders about Paris, goes to the cinema. He reads every word of the newspaper, but the content is essentially meaningless to him and his life. He tries to impose an order on his life, but that makes little difference.
He grows no wiser.
He finds, in the end, also that: "Indifference is futile."
Perec closes the book with some hope of finding one's place in the world - and as part of the world -, in his own way. His character is, ultimately, not an island. At the end he is waking, gently, just.
The vision of the modern condition, of youthful anxiety and inner philosophical turmoil Perec offers is not a new or uncommon one, but he displays a fine touch in presenting it. The direct address is effective: the reader does not see him or herself as the "you", but rather sees it clearly as the character Perec has invented - or as Perec himself. The man - the author -is struggling to come to terms with his condition, and he is only able to analyze it (or even just consider it) from this oblique point of view.
Perec avoids being sententious or ponderous or dramatic - or bland. The novella - short, in any case - is surprisingly brisk and amusing, and not just a litany of complaint or self-doubt.
A nice, small success." - The Complete Review
Georges Perec, A Void, Trans. by Gilbert Adair, David R Godine, 2005.
"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 Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician, acrobat, and sad-eyed clown. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. Adair's translation, too, is astounding; Time called it "a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."
“A Void” (in French, La Disparition), written by Georges Perec in 1969 without using the vowel “e” , is probably the finest example of lipogrammatic fiction in world literature.
The book is a kind of metaphysical thriller, following the well-acclaimed Borgesian tradition. The protagonist of the book, Anton Vowl, suddenly disappears from his residence in Paris. His friends try to solve the mystery of this strange disappearance by rummaging through Vowl’s diary, notes and letters, containing mostly his strange word plays, metaphoric writings and yes, lipograms. In the process of getting into the heart of the mystery they find themselves at the very centre of an atrocious and hyperbolic conspiracy which puts their own lives in danger. The book goes on unfurling plots after plots which become more and more complicated each time, involving murders, family secrets and relentless pursuit after trails. The book is also infested with Perec's notorious cross-references and red herrings. Here, amongst other things, we find a lipogrammatic version of Rimbaud's poem and that of Shelley's Ozymandias.
The pun in the title quite succinctly describes its theme—it is a book about a void as well as avoidance. The book has a void due to its strange avoidance of the vowel “e”, which, in turn, determines the fate of its characters (remember the surname of the protagonist—Vowl, a vowel without an“e”). That’s why, throughout the book we repeatedly come across a strange folio consisting of 26 volumes, out of which the 5th one is always missing. In fact, the book itself has 26 chapters but there is no 5th chapter in it, but a conspicuous blank page instead. Each of the characters in the book is a prey of an unavoidable destiny. The shadow of a past mystery runs after their lives and curiously links them up to a common misfortune. It hints at the fact that we all have a void inherent in our existence and however hard we try to avoid that, it doggedly chases after us and determines our fates. On the other hand, if we somehow manage to peep into that void, we are doomed forever. Characters in this book are in search of that void because finding it out will give a meaning to their otherwise absurd lives—that is, being mere puppets within their own socio-political milieu, without the ability to intervene or change its course. They pursue it through joining the missing links, following the faint trail of some distant possibilities and by pure coincidences, thereby trying to overcome their limitations and restrictions (it also brings forth the limitation of the book itself, the restriction of not using “e”). But at the end, all their efforts amount to a fatalistic blow, exterminating themselves. So, eventually, the book becomes a commentary on its own self, desperately trying to give a meaning to a random sequence of events, and once that is done, it has to stop, to come to an inevitable conclusion.
PS: When I first started reading the book, I was quite put off as the language appeared to me a bit phony and cumbersome. I was actually blaming Perec mentally for writing such a book after the brilliant feat of “Life: A User’s Manual”. For the initial 14 chapters, I just carried on reading as I didn’t want to add another book to my “to be read” collection and was trying to finish it as soon as possible. But my interest started building up from section IV of the book (it has six sections in total, without any section II), and after that, it was a complete literary whirlwind which didn’t allow me to put down the book once, except for that 40 winks at night (that too, chock-full of nightmares)." - Souva Chattopadhyay
Georges Perec, Thoughts of Sorts, Trans. by David Bellos, David R Godine, 2009.
"Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec's final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985. With this translation, David Bellos, Perec's preeminent translator, has completed the Godine list of Perec's great works translated into English and has provided an introduction to this master of systematic versatility. Thoughts of Sorts; is a compilation of musings and essays attempting to circumscribe, in Perec's words, my experience of the world not in terms of the reflections it casts in distant places, but at its actual point of breaking surface. Perec investigates the ways by which we define our place in the world, reveling in list-making, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and, as the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical/atypical Perec fashion."
Thoughts of Sorts is a translation of the posthumous collection of stray pieces, Penser/Classer. Eight of the thirteen pieces were previously translated by John Sturrock and included in the collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
The titles the translators chose already suggests considerable differences: Sturrock translated the title-piece 'Think/Classify', while Bellos already opts for a more (word)playful variation. Bellos takes even greater liberties with, for example, the title of the opening piece, originally published as 'Notes sur ce que je cherche': Sturrock dutifully and accurately translates this as 'Notes on What I'm Looking For', while Bellos goes for the much bolder 'Statement of Intent'.
The piece itself quite readily justifies substituting the newspaper-article headline with a claim of 'Statement of Intent'. After all, it opens:
When I attempt to state what I have tried to do as a writer since I began, what occurs to me first of all is that I have never written two books of the same kind, or ever wanted to reuse a formula, or a system, or an approach already developed in some earlier work.
It's a useful reminder to those who think of Perec as merely an Oulipo-writer, and the brief non-fiction pieces collected in this volume also again demonstrate his remarkable versatility.
Certainly, there are certain kinds of games and styles he favored - as is clear in his complaint that:
Contemporary writers (with a few exceptions, such as Michel Butor) have forgotten the art of enumeration.
And the mathematical creeps into several of these projects: there are the eighty-one recipes that allow for three variations of each of the four elements (3x3x3x3=81), or the attempt to introduce Jacques Roubaud's limit on the number of books one's library should hold (361) - which immediately gets bogged down by the question of what should qualify as a 'book' (single volumes ? multi-volume works ? an author's output ? a theme ?).
The title-piece - Perec's thoughts on sorting and classifying - is particularly revealing, since so much of his work does, in some way deal with issues of sorting, ordering, classifying, etc. So it is telling when he admits that:
My problem with sorting orders is that they do not last; I have scarcely finished filing things before the filing system is obsolete.
And, equally significantly:
All utopias are depressing, because they leave no place for chance, for difference, for the miscellaneous. It's all been sorted into an order, and order reigns.
Lurking behind every utopia is a great taxonomic design: a place for everything and every thing in its place.
In 'On the Art and Craft of Sorting Books', addressing that age-old problem, Perec also observes:
If you do not keep on sorting your books, your books unsort themselves: it is the example I was given to try to get me to understand what entropy was: personal experience has provided me with frequent demonstrations of it.
Throughout these pieces, and throughout his work, that struggle between order and entropy is constantly played out, and much of the charm of the work is in how Perec allows entropy to creep into even his strictest orders, pushing his taxonomic designs to their limits (and even, in some senses, breaking them down).
Thoughts of Sorts is a very enjoyable collection, from the useful 'Statement of Intent' to its consideration of the physical act of reading and Perec's 'Thoughts of Sorts/Sorts of Thoughts'. Pieces such as the recipes, or his revisiting Malet & Isaac - his school history text -, are perhaps of more limited use and interest, but are amusing variations on his underlying theme, and can certainly be skimmed over more quickly. There are enough stand-out (and revealing) pieces that this is yet another must-read for any Perec-fan." - M.A.Orthofer
Georges Perec, Three by Perec, Trans. by Ian Monk, David R Godine, 2004.
"Perec has rightfully assumed his position in the pantheon of truly original writers of the past century. Godine has issued all but one of is his books in this country, including his masterpiece Life, A User's Manual. Here, in one volume, are three "easy pieces" by the master of the verbal firecracker and Gallic wit. The novella "The Exeter Text" contains all those e's that were omitted from A Void (Perec hated waste) and no other vowel (honest). In "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?" we are introduced to Sergeant Henri Pollak and his vehicle (the aforementioned moped) that carried him between Vincennes and Montparnasse; in "A Gallery Portrait", the sensation of the 1913 exhibition in Pittsburgh depicts the artists' patron, beer baron Hermann Raffke, sitting in front of his huge art collection, which includes (of course) "A Gallery Portrait" of the baron sitting before "A Gallery Portrait," etc."
Georges Perec, 53 Days, Trans. by Harry Mathews & David Bellos, David R Godine, 2000.
"Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) and A Void, was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty-eight, but left extensive drafts and notes supplying the rest of the mystery, as well as numerous twists and subplots. From these notes, his friends and fellow novelists Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud have assembled the elements of the unfinished mystery, along the way providing the reader with a fascinating view into the author's mind as he constructed his literary conundrum.
Absorbing, allusive, and joyously playful, "53 Days" is the ultimate detective story. 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. From this beginning, Perec lures the reader into a labyrinth of mirror-stories whose solutions can only be glimpsed before they in turn recede around the corner.
In the tradition of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Perec's "53 Days" is a supremely satisfying, engrossing, and truly original mystery. Like his previous work, it is also "a kaleidoscope of ingenious juxtapositions" (Le Monde) from one of the century's most inventive and important writers. As Harry Mathews has commented, "If death had not prevented Georges Perec from completing this book, we would today be reading a masterpiece, one in the mold of Nabokov's Pale Fire."
"The novel's very incompletion allows the reader, who will be equally fascinated by the finished chapters and the jottings, the notes, to understand something of how Georges Perec—with his intuitions, imagination, memories, and culture—put together a novel." — La Vie des Livres
"Perec (Life, a User's Manual) had finished 11 of his planned 28 chapters in this murder mystery at the time of his death from cancer in 1982. Distinguished colleagues and fellow novelists Mathews and Roubaud, guided by Perec's voluminous notes and drafts, assembled this version of his complex literary thriller in 1989. Now translated into English, this novel/puzzle is an intellectual dragnet whose narrator is called upon by the French Consul to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of famous French crime-writer Robert Serval. The narrator must investigate in secret, armed with only a briefcase containing Serval's manuscript, called "The Crypt," which contains a story of love, murder and secret codes, set in the freezing Nordic country of Fernland. The narrator, meanwhile, lives in fictional French Grianta, a region of blisteringly hot weather. The collection of puzzling clues, which he decodes, recombines, and cross-references, are full of literary puns, acronyms, palindromes and equations. Conceived of in Chinese boxes, this novel leans heavily on its many references. The narrator and the reader are often abruptly referred to the works of Agatha Christie and Andr? Gide; and the title itself reflects the time it took Stendhal to write The Charterhouse of Parma. The narrator may or may not be distinct from author Perec, just as the framing novel may mirror, foil or illuminate the mystery of "The Crypt." By the end, Perec/the narrator has decided upon a solution, not to be confused with the truth, which, "barely touched upon, recedes into the distance." While the linguistic brainstorm, complete with its unorthodox format and formulae, may baffle, fans of Perec (who wrote his novel A Void completely omitting the letter "e") should anticipate that the "just the facts, ma'am" mode of detective novels will be ingeniously frustrated in his last work." - Publishers Weekly
"Though mystery addicts may balk at its inconclusiveness, readers of every other persuasion will find much to delight them in this deft intellectual thriller left unfinished when Perec, arguably this century's most accomplished metafictionist and punster (such innovative texts as Life: A User's Manual,1987, and A Void,1995) died in 1982. The search for missing mystery writer Robert Serval, conducted by this storys narrator, a teacher ``studying'' Serval's uncompleted manuscript The Crypt, rapidly escalates into a voyage to remote (imaginary) territory and a series of droll parodies of literary ancestors (Agatha Christie is a prominent example). Even in its inchoate state (smoothed out by fellow ``Oulipo'' experimentalists Mathews and Roubaud), Perec's dazzling gamesmanship offers sophisticated pleasures reminiscent of, and often equal to, the legacies bequeathed to us by his masters Joyce and Nabokov." - Kirkus Reviews
"Given that this is a novel about an incomplete novel, this marvelous work of nested narratives, mirror books, and allusive clues becomes all the more notable because it is unfinished. Far from feeling cheated, the reader takes on the detective’s role, poring over drafts to find clues and hidden structures. It is a must for any reader of the Oulipo, for it shows so much of the puzzle work behind their puzzling work." - David Ian Paddy
"Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud, have assembled all the extant building-blocks for the task. But whether, if and when the book is completed, it will turn out to be a literary masterpiece, who can say ? My own suspicion is that, had Perec himself lived to complete it, what would have been found in the last of a series of Chinese boxes fitted ingeniously one into another would have been merely a void." - Francis King
"(T)he reading of the truncated manuscript proves quite entertaining; it will certainly be especially interesting to those already familiar with Perec's work, since it provides us with an unusual insight into the procedures and considerations that organized the author's writing." - Karlis Racevskis
"53 Days" is the novel Georges Perec was working on at his death. Only about half of it was completed, but extensive notes suggest much of what Perec planned to do. Long-time Perec friends and Oulipo associates Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud put the pieces together and published this version of the text, which was then translated by Perec-biographer David Bellos (who also translated Perec's magnum opus, Life A User's Manual). It makes for a remarkable volume - and also a sad testament to what might have been.
"53 Days" is a two-part novel. The first part is titled 53 Days and consists of thirteen chapters, of which the first eleven - or at least a (very readable) first draft of them - were completed. The typescript ends a short way into chapter twelve, and it and the final chapter of this section are only presented in (fairly detailed) outline. The second part of the novel was to be titled "Un R est un M qui se P le L de la R". It was to have fifteen chapters, and is presented only in very rough outline (in just twenty-two pages).
However, this volume also contains some 130 pages of drafts and notes (and six facsimile-pages), providing a great deal of information about what was to happen - and what is behind (inside ?) the text. As one might (or must) expect from a Perec-text, there is a great deal more than meets the eye, from inspiration to allusions to rules governing many aspects of the text - and the notes give considerable insight into what Perec did and meant to do.
The first hundred pages of the book read almost like a straightforward, vaguely highbrow mystery novel - except, of course, that nothing in Perec is truly straightforward. But at first it almost appears so. The narrative is straightforward, the exposition clear, the mysteries only slowly growing in confounding complexity.
The setting is Grianta, in a former French colony in Africa. The unnamed narrator is a Frenchman who teaches at the local Lycée Français. He is summoned to an audience with the French Consul, who tells him of the disappearance of one of Grianta's more famous French residents, the mystery-writer Robert Serval. Serval apparently knew he was in danger, and told the Consul. He also gave the Consul an envelope, which he instructed the Consul to give to the narrator - and no one else - if he hadn't reclaimed it by a certain date.
The Consul asks the narrator to look into Serval's disappearance - and in particular to see if he can find any clues in the manuscript that Serval put in the envelope. The narrator is a bit mystified by these events, but agrees. Apparently the narrator and Serval - whose real name is Stéphane Réal - had attended school together years earlier, but the narrator has no recollection of him. Looking through the manuscript, a mystery titled The Crypt, doesn't get him much farther either.
He's sure there are some clues in the story, but it is a tricky mystery, with multiple suspects, a detective who shares the same name as the author, and a great deal of uncertainty:
Every time some piece of the puzzle begins to come into focus, it fades away in a blur, evaporates in a wisp of thin and dubious haze, or gets bogged down in paperwork without sense or substance. Interrogation follows interrogation, statement follows statement - and each one brings more tiny contradictions to light which further obfuscate the ungraspable, unseeable reality which the investigators are trying so hard to reconstitute.
The Crypt apparently follows the pattern of many of Serval's books - and frustratingly only a few aspects of it overlap with the reality the narrator is faced with. It is set in a cold, northern country, and few elements are borrowed from the Griantan world. Frustratingly, the manuscript comes to an end right before the climactic denouement, the last page (pages ?) remaining unwritten.
The narrator does, however, identify four texts that were used as models for the plot and text, from an Agatha Christie novel (And Then There Were None) to a spy story called The Koala Case Mystery. Only fourteen lines were taken from the latter: after substituting twelve words, they were used verbatim in The Crypt - making for a typical Perecian puzzle.
And so the plot thickens, and grows more convoluted, and the books-within-books add layers to the puzzle, rather than yielding the secret to Serval's disappearance. An intuition nags the narrator:
that the truth I am after is not in the book, but between the books
But even that doesn't get him far enough fast enough. Meanwhile, political unrest in Grianta further complicates matters. And there are those that get wise to the narrator's research and warn him off.
The crime behind it all suddenly does appear to make sense to the narrator: a plot to steal a giant ancient statue. But by pursuing it the narrator gets himself caught up in events, discovering too late that it's all been an elaborate plot to ensnare him. But all this is only the first (and largely complete) part: the second part turns it all around again. The writer Robert Serval has disappeared, and a manuscript has been found in his abandoned car. The title: 53 Days .....
This time a man named Salini is given the manuscript, in the hope that he can find "the key to our problem" in it. There's little of the detail found in the first part here - only the bare outlines, as Perec never got around to actually writing out these scenes - but enough is made clear to see where this was going. Again there's a trail of false and literary clues. And the end reveals:
Salini (to Patricia): Who wrote the book ?
P: A novelist whom we met at . he is called GP apparently he adores these sorts of problems. We gave him a number of key words, themes, names. It was up to him what he did with them.
'GP' is, of course, Perec himself.
The notes and drafts reveal many of the games underlying the novel - though the translation into English complicates matters considerably.
Most significantly: the titles. They - as much else in the book - lean on Stendhal. '53 days' refers to the length of time it took Stendhal to write The Charterhouse of Parma (and both Perec's book and Stendhal's begin with mention of the same day, 15 May). 'Un R est un M qui se P le L de la R' refers to a variation on Stendhal's "celebrated definition of the novel" (so Bellos): "Un Roman est un Miroir qui se Promène le Long de la Route, 'a novel is a mirror walking along a road".
There are many more Stendhalian allusions, and a good deal of wordplay and more. The notes and drafts suggest much of what Perec did (and hoped to do), and while it doesn't make for a fluid narrative or gripping story it is interesting to see this raw material out of which one can imagine a fiction being built.
Mathews, Roubaud, and Bellos have done an admirable job here of presenting Perec's material. The novel it was meant to become is clearly recognisable, and the presentation reader-friendly enough that it is a pleasure rather than a pain to work ones way through. The contrast between the nearly completed first half - an engaging read and promising start - and the barely outlined second half is frustrating - but the book as a whole is still very much worth a look. It is certainly also of interest as a rare behind-the-scenes look at how a novel can be created (neatly shown half done and half only conceived). And for Perec fans it is a must, showing more clearly than most of his texts the workings of this remarkable mind.
Mathews and Roubaud have admirably stayed in the background here: there are almost no editorial notes by them, no explanations, no theories. In a way this good: all the reader has is Perec's words - and yet it's perhaps not entirely honest, since presumably the editorial process did involve making decisions and even imposing a certain 'reading' on the text. A bit of explanation (and an introduction to the text) might have been welcome.
As is, the only editorial notes are translator Bellos' (including five lines quoting the editors - perhaps there was a longer explanation by them in the French edition ?) - and he too is sparing in his comments and explanations. Perhaps exegesis is better left for elsewhere, but a bit of introduction, history, context, and explanation would probably have helped most readers along." - Te Complete Review
Georges Perec, The Machine, Translated by Ulrich Schönherr, 1968/1972.
"The concept behind The Machine is:
"This radio play seeks to simulate the functioning of a computer programmed to analyze and decompose Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Rambler's Lullaby II.
The short, simple poem - Wandrers Nachtlied II - is one of Goethe's best-known, and one of the greatest in the German language. When it was first performed on German radio the audience of The Machine would have been entirely familiar with the poem, which presumably enhances the effects of the piece; nevertheless, the simplicity of the poem makes the work readily accessible (especially in printed form) even to those who did not grow up with Goethe's words.
Perec takes the poem and subjects it to a number of operations - protocols that are, essentially, Oulipian constraints. And, as he explains:
To the attentive listener it may become clear that this play about language not only describes the functioning of a machine, but also, though in a more concealed and subtle manner, the inner mechanism of poetry.
Beginning with a purely technical analysis - "number of words", "number of metrical feet", etc. - Perec takes apart and pieces back together the poem in all sorts of ways. It is read front to back, bottom to top, randomly. Then come the more elaborate renderings and readings.
From simple rules ("omission of the last word of each line", "insertion of sounds in the word center") to "proverbialization" and "encyclopaedic diversification" he re-writes the poem in dozens of different forms. It's a study in the ways of the Oulipo (and language/machine-rules) but, surprisingly, also quite illuminating. Poetry does beget more poetry, even in this treatment.
There's some invention as well: in one of the most inspired stretches Perec has the processors try to reconstruct the poem. Along the way there are some missteps, such as when they go off track and wind up suggesting the infamous "Deutschland über alles" ("germany above everything/in the world") - which is quickly brought to a stop:
SOUND
stop
back to processor 1
While the first two (of four) protocols treat the poem proper - linguistically and semantically - the third is "essentially critical in nature", examining: "the possible relationships and cross-references between the poem and the author". Judgements, associations, and quotes make for an intriguing additional layer, though this is the shortest section of the piece.
The fourth protocol is full of free-association, as other material and poems are quoted, from Hölderlin, Brecht, Borges, Bataille, Emily Dickinson, and others.
Brilliantly, then, it all moves towards silence, words reduced to sound, and ultimately to a simple, final:
shshshsh
The Machine is a radio-play, and to be fully appreciated presumably must be heard, rather than merely read - yet it is on the page, where the substitutions and changes are more easily seen and followed, that it works particularly well.
An excellent introduction to Oulipo-writing, The Machine is nearly perfect, accomplishing everything Perec sets out to do. It's also wonderfully entertaining.
Highly recommended, and essential reading for anyone interested in the Oulipo, Perec, or Goethe's poem. Or, indeed, the workings of poetry in general." - M.A.Orthofer
Reading Georges Perec by Warren Motte
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXIX, #1 Georges Perec
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XIII, #1 Georges Perec / Felipe Alfau
Caitlin Pantos, "Eternal Tableaux; Space, Time and Georges Perec"
"Georges Perec" by Braulio Tavares
OULIPO
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