Georges Perec

Author profile

born

March 07, 1936 in Paris, France

died

March 03, 1982

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction, Biographies & Memoirs, Poetry

About this author

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Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific...more Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.

It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").

W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.(less)

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Average rating: 4.08 · 4,386 ratings · 460 reviews · 57 distinct works

	Life, a User's Manual by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 4.29 avg rating — 1,440 ratings — published 1978 — 33 editions	My rating:
	A Void by Georges Perec, Gilbert Adair (Translator) 3.82 avg rating — 652 ratings — published 1969 — 16 editions	My rating:
	Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, John Sturrock (Translator) 4.33 avg rating — 443 ratings — published 1974 — 14 editions	My rating:
	W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 3.93 avg rating — 424 ratings — published 1975 — 14 editions	My rating:
	Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator), Andrew Leak (Translator) 4.04 avg rating — 281 ratings — published 1967 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Les Choses 3.78 avg rating — 293 ratings — published 1965 — 20 editions	My rating:
	Un homme qui dort 4.18 avg rating — 142 ratings — published 1967 — 13 editions	My rating:
	An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal (Translator) 3.96 avg rating — 113 ratings — published 1975 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise 3.82 avg rating — 97 ratings — published 1969 — 12 editions	My rating:
	Three By Perec 3.67 avg rating — 70 ratings — published 1996 — 2 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Georges Perec

“Question your tea spoons.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

tags: oulipo

24 people liked it

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”
― Georges Perec, L'infra Ordinaire

tags: oulipo

17 people liked it

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep

15 people liked it

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Georges Perec

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