Georges Perec
Georges Perec
thumb|328px|Plaque in tribute to [[georges-perec by Christophe Verdon. Café de la Mairie, Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris.]]
Georges Perec (; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.]] Many of Perec's novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
Perec's first novel Les Choses (published in English as Things: A Story of the Sixties) (1965) was awarded the Prix Renaudot.
Perec's most famous novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual) was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. La Vie mode d'emploi is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity. The 99 chapters of his 600-page novel move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of the building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants. At the end, it is revealed that the whole book actually takes place in a single moment, with a final twist that is an example of "cosmic irony". It was translated into English by David Bellos in 1987.
Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). 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 that is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: The first is a fictional outline of a remote island country called "W", which at first appears to be a utopian society modelled on the Olympic ideal but is gradually exposed as a horrifying, totalitarian prison much like a concentration camp. The second is a description of Perec's childhood during and after World War II. Both narratives converge towards the end, highlighting the common theme of the Holocaust.
"Cantatrix sopranica L. Scientific Papers" is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes; e.g., "(Karybb & Szyla, 1973)".
David Bellos, who has translated several of Perec's works, wrote an extensive biography of Perec entitled Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
The Association Georges Perec has extensive archives on the author in Paris.
In 1992 Perec's initially rejected novel Gaspard pas mort (Gaspard not dead), believed to be lost, was found by David Bellos amongst papers in the house of Perec's friend . The novel was reworked several times and retitled **' and published in 2012; its English translation by Bellos followed in 2014 as *Portrait of a Man* after the 1475 painting of that name by Antonello da Messina. The initial title borrows the name Gaspard from the Paul Verlaine poem "Gaspar Hauser Chante" (inspired by Kaspar Hauser, from the 1881 collection *Sagesse*) and characters named "Gaspard" appear in both *W, or the Memory of Childhood* and *Life: A User's Manual*, while in *MICRO-TRADUCTIONS, 15 variations discrètes sur un poème connu* he creatively re-writes the Verlaine poem fifteen times.
Memorials Asteroid no. 2817, discovered in 1982, was named after Perec. In 1994, a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris was named after him, . The French postal service issued a stamp in 2002 in his honour; it was designed by Marc Taraskoff and engraved by Pierre Albuisson. He was featured as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday.
Works ### Books The most complete bibliography of Perec's works is Bernard Magné's Tentative d'inventaire pas trop approximatif des écrits de Georges Perec (Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1993).
Films Un homme qui dort*, 1974 (with Bernard Queysanne, English title: *The Man Who Sleeps*) Les Lieux d'une fugue*, 1975 Série noire* (Alain Corneau, 1979) Ellis Island* (TV film with Robert Bober)
References ## Further reading Biographies Georges Perec: A Life in Words* by David Bellos (1993)
- Criticism*'
- The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec* by Warren Motte (1984)
- Perec ou les textes croisés* by J. Pedersen (1985). In French.
- Pour un Perec lettré, chiffré* by J.-M. Raynaud (1987). In French.
- Georges Perec* by Claude Burgelin (1988). In French.
- [Georges Perec: Traces of His Passage](https://books.google.co.il/books?id=oOh7uU6TcGYC&lpg=PP7&hl=iw&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false) by Paul Schwartz (1988)
- Perecollages 1981–1988 by Bernard Magné (1989). In French.
- La Mémoire et l'oblique by Philippe Lejeune (1991). In French.
- Georges Perec: Ecrire Pour Ne Pas Dire by Stella Béhar (1995). In French.
- Poétique de Georges Perec: «...une trace, une marque ou quelques signes» by Jacques-Denis Bertharion (1998) In French.
- Georges Perec Et I'Histoire, ed. by Carsten Sestoft & Steen Bille Jorgensen (2000). In French.
- *La Grande Catena. Studi su "La Vie mode d'emploi"'' by Rinaldo Rinaldi (2004). In Italian.