Georges Perec

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Image:Georges Perec.jpg Template:French literature (small) Georges Perec (March 7, 1936 - March 3, 1982) was a 20th century French novelist, filmmaker and essayist, a member of the Oulipo group and considered by many to be one of the most important post-WWII authors.

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Life

Perec was born in a working class neighbourhood in Paris, the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relation of Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz. Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from unattended gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and Perec's mother perished in the Nazi Holocaust, probably in Auschwitz. Perec was taken into the care of his paternal aunt and uncle in 1942, and in 1945 he was formally adopted by them.

He started writing reviews and essays for Nouvelle Revue Française and Les Lettres Nouvelles, prominent literary publications, while studying history and sociology at the Sorbonne. In 1958-59 Perec served in the army, and married Paulette Petras after being discharged. They spent one year (1960-1961) in Sfax (Tunisia), where Paulette worked as a teacher.

In 1961, Perec began working as an archivist at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory attached to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, a low paid position he kept until 1978. A few reviewers have noted that the daily handling of records and variegated data may have had an influence on his literary style. Perec's other major influence was the Oulipo, which he joined in 1967, meeting Raymond Queneau, among others. Perec dedicated his masterpiece, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual) to Queneau, who died before it was published.

Perec began working on a series of radio plays with his translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz in the late 60s; less than a decade later, he was making films. His first work, based on his novel Un Homme qui dort, was co-directed by Bernard Queysanne, and won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974. Perec also created crossword puzzles for Le Point from 1976 on.

La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) brought him some financial and critical success - it won the Prix Médicis - and allowed Perec to turn to writing full-time. He was a writer in residence at the University of Queensland, Australia in 1981, during which time he worked on the unfinished 53 Jours (53 Days). Shortly after his return from Australia, his health deteriorated. A heavy smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died the following year, only forty-five years old.

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Work

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, 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, eg "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300 page novel A Void (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).

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This even affects 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, 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, that 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 bourse for biography of the Académie Goncourt in 1994.

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Bibliography

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Works by Perec

Selected works:

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Works on Perec

  • The Poetics of Experiment by Warren Motte (1984)
  • Perec ou les textes croisés by J. Pedersen (1985)
  • Pour un Perec lettré, chiffré by J-M. Raynaud (1987)
  • Georges Perec by Claude Burgelin (1988)
  • Georges Perec: Traces of His Passage by Paul Schwartz (1988)
  • Perecollages 1981-1988 by Bernard Magné (1989)
  • La Mémoire et l'oblique by Philippe Lejeune (1991)
  • Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos (1993)
  • Georges Perec: Ecrire Pour Ne Pas Dire by Stella Béhar (1995)
  • Georges Perec Et I'Histoire, ed. by Carsten Sestoft & Steen Bille Jorgensen (2000)
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External links

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