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

edit data

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...moreGeorges 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)

See if your friends have read any of Georges Perec's books.

combine editions
Books by Georges Perec

Average rating: 4.07 · 3,809 ratings · 429 reviews · 56 distinct works

	Life, a User's Manual 4.28 avg rating — 1,248 ratings — published 1978 — 33 editions	My rating:
	A Void by Georges Perec, Gilbert Adair (Translator) 3.79 avg rating — 593 ratings — published 1969 — 17 editions	My rating:
	Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, John Sturrock (Translator) 4.29 avg rating — 385 ratings — published 1974 — 12 editions	My rating:
	W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 3.94 avg rating — 364 ratings — published 1975 — 13 editions	My rating:
	Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator), Andrew Leak (Translator) 4.02 avg rating — 245 ratings — published 1967 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Les Choses 3.77 avg rating — 254 ratings — published 1965 — 20 editions	My rating:
	Un Homme Qui Dort 4.15 avg rating — 112 ratings — published 1967 — 11 editions	My rating:
	An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal (Translator) 4.02 avg rating — 94 ratings — published 1975 — 6 editions	My rating:
	The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise 3.81 avg rating — 81 ratings — published 1969 — 12 editions	My rating:
	Three By Perec 3.65 avg rating — 62 ratings — published 1996 — 2 editions	My rating:

More books by Georges Perec…

Quotes by Georges Perec

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

tags: oulipo

18 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

14 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

12 people liked it

See all Georges Perec's quotes »

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
The Haters Club: Five By Five (Survey Time)	53	40	Sep 05, 2009 06:15pm
Pick-a-Shelf: 2010-05 - French - What will you Read in May?	65	93	May 30, 2010 12:43pm
Bookish: 17June11	8	26	Jun 18, 2011 09:20am
JoCo Library Teens: Random Chat [a.k.a. "The Annie Folder"]	5064	50	Jan 01, 2012 08:35pm
Romance Readers R...: The 4 Elements Challenge	255	299	Jan 04, 2012 08:28am
Around the World ...: France	10	40	Feb 10, 2012 07:57am
Brain Pain: Suggestions for "The Spine 2013"	198	130	Feb 20, 2012 12:35am

More…

Georges's Fans (119)

Georges Perec

Author profile

combine editionsBooks by Georges Perec

Quotes by Georges Perec

Topics Mentioning This Author

combine editions
Books by Georges Perec