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George Perec

I was recently exposed to excerpts from George Perec's work and really enjoyed it. Does anyone have a recommendation about where to start from in his books?


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I'm glad you enjoyed what you've read by Georges Perec - he's one of my favourite writers. What I like about him is, first of all, his playfulness - he was very interested in games, intricate systems with their own rules, like chess or Go. Besides being a novelist, he also compiled crosswords for for the magazine Le Point. The Believer magazine has lately published his introduction to the books of his crosswords that were published, which is worth a read -

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_perec

He was fascinated by how we define and classify the world, by the amount of detail we're prepared to ascribe to it - his masterpiece, La Vie Mode d'Emploi, (Life A User's Manual) is, among other things, an obsessive description of the lives and living-spaces of the inhabitants of  a Paris apartment block - and by language, the tool we use to describe it. His other major theme is absence - he was orphaned in tragic circumstances, his father killed in 1940 fighting in the French army, his mother murdered in Auschwitz, sometime before 1945 - his other important book, La Disparition, contains no instance of the letter E, it consequently being impossible for him to use the French words for mother or father within it.  David Bellos' biography of him is very illuminating indeed, and very well written. Of his own works, besides the two I've mentioned, a collection of his essays and other writings called Species of Spaces will give you about the best introduction you could have to his way of looking at things.


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

Another option is to begin with his 1978, Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work - The 99 chapters that move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

I would start with one of the two and than go on to his later works.

 

Omer

 

 


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