Georges Perec (Author of Life)

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Georges Perec鈥檚 Followers (1,565)

Georges Perec

Born

in Paris, France

March 07, 1936

Died

March 03, 1982

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Biographies & Memoirs, Philosophy

Influences

Raymond Roussel, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, Laurence Sterne, ...more

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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.

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 M茅dicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of thi 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.

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 M茅dicis 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 P猫re Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Acad茅mie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994. ...more

Combine Editions
Georges Perec鈥檚 books

Average rating: 3.94 · 45,357 ratings · 4,777 reviews · 133 distinct works 鈥� Similar authors

	Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 4.18 avg rating — 9,649 ratings — published 1978 — 18 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Un homme qui dort 4.04 avg rating — 6,675 ratings — published 1967 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Les Choses 3.80 avg rating — 5,550 ratings — published 1965 — 114 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Species of Spaces and Other Pieces 4.27 avg rating — 3,823 ratings — published 1974 — 49 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 3.81 avg rating — 4,041 ratings — published 1975 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Void 3.75 avg rating — 3,696 ratings — published 1969 — 58 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal (Translator) 3.69 avg rating — 2,055 ratings — published 1975 — 26 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator), Andrew Leak (Translator) 3.98 avg rating — 1,620 ratings — published 1965 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator) 3.82 avg rating — 1,355 ratings — published 1968 — 37 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Quel petit v茅lo 脿 guidon chrom茅 au fond de la cour ? 3.86 avg rating — 772 ratings — published 1966 — 38 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Georges Perec (?)

“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

149 likes

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

tags: oulipo

98 likes

“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

76 likes

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Polls

Time for the poll for April's novella.
Listed below are the books nominated.
Good Luck everyone.
The poll will remain open until March 28th.
Thanks and happy reading...

The Fall by Albert Camus

7 votes, 36.8%

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

4 votes, 21.1%

Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood by Drema Hall Berkheimer

3 votes, 15.8%

W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec

3 votes, 15.8%

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

2 votes, 10.5%

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1 by Beth Brower

0 votes, 0.0%

Red Dog by Louis de Berni猫res

0 votes, 0.0%

The Moslem Wife and Other Stories by Mavis Gallant

0 votes, 0.0%

19 total votes

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