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303 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Georges Perec
132 books1,649 followersGeorges 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.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
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.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
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.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 3, 2016
Amo La vita istruzioni per l'uso, l'ho trovato geniale, divertente, accattivante, e più più più begli aggettivi che ora non mi vengono in mente. Mentre lo leggevo cercavo in rete informazioni sui contraintes con cui Perec ha costruito questo gioiello, ma quelle che trovavo non erano complete, per lo meno non abbastanza da soddisfare la mia curiosità, volevo quasi entrare nella testa dello scrittore mentre ideava e scriveva.
Questo libro (che non ho purtroppo trovato in vendita a un prezzo per me abbordabile ma ho preso in prestito in una delle poche biblioteche italiane che l'hanno a catalogo, sia lodato il prestito interbibliotecario!) è la riproduzione di parte dei cahier des charges, gli appunti, l'inventario di cose persone e tutto il mondo che Perec ha creato nel suo romanzo, preceduta da un' introduzione che analizza in maniera semplice ed esauriente la poligrafia del cavaliere, il biquadrato latino e la pseudo-quenine usati dall'autore per dare origine rigorosamente non casuale ai vari capitoli. Beh, adesso la mia curiosità si può dire soddisfatta :-), ma mi dispiace davvero doverlo restituire.
Questo libro (che non ho purtroppo trovato in vendita a un prezzo per me abbordabile ma ho preso in prestito in una delle poche biblioteche italiane che l'hanno a catalogo, sia lodato il prestito interbibliotecario!) è la riproduzione di parte dei cahier des charges, gli appunti, l'inventario di cose persone e tutto il mondo che Perec ha creato nel suo romanzo, preceduta da un' introduzione che analizza in maniera semplice ed esauriente la poligrafia del cavaliere, il biquadrato latino e la pseudo-quenine usati dall'autore per dare origine rigorosamente non casuale ai vari capitoli. Beh, adesso la mia curiosità si può dire soddisfatta :-), ma mi dispiace davvero doverlo restituire.
July 20, 2013
very funny book. I think of it often. The artist that traveled the world painting water colors, then deconstructed them and put them together in another way. Lots of interesting turns. I read in French. Should read in English. It took me hours and hours of sitting in the coffee shop. I learned a lot of French, but probably missed some of the points.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews