Georges Perec

[beer good]

I'm not a huge authority on Perec by any means. Most of what I know about him comes from brief author's portraits on the backs of the two books of his I've read. So take this for what it is: just an attempt at saying something about those books and possibly about the writer.

Apparently, Perec is considered either one of the last modernists or one of the original post-modernists. He seems to have had as a credo that each novel he wrote would be a brand new form of novel; not just the content, but the very structure, idea of novels would be challenged. He set constraints for himself, and claimed that a writer had his greatest freedom in limitations.

La Disparition (translated to English as either A Void or A Vanishing) from 1969 is perhaps the most famous example of this: it's a mystery novel about a man (Mr Anton Vowl) who one day disappears without a trace. And with him, something else goes missing from the storyline itself, and its characters spend the entire novel trying to figure out what has been taken from them. Obviously, they can't, since what's missing is the letter E. The entire novel, 340-odd pages, is written without the letter E. (There's also no fifth chapter, and if memory serves, no number 5 - in a way, it's the mirror image of Pynchon's V.)

While this may look like experimentation for its own sake, it actually turns into one of the most mind-boggling novels I've read; not only does Perec have to perform one impressive verbal somersault after another to be able to say what he wants to say without using one of the most common letters there is (and his poor translators, of course, are limited both by the words that contain E in French AND in the language they're translating to), but somehow it turns into a story of... the search for something that's supposedly missing altogether from everything. Call it the God-shaped hole, call it the meaning of life, call it the holy grail, call it Self... whatever is missing and we can't quite put our fingers on because we lack the language to name it. The characters dive right through Western culture - the book draws many parallels to Moby-Dick, though of course they can't name H-rman M-lvill-; the hunt for that white/blank (blanc/blanche) space we will never catch. If you want to take the autobiographical interpretation, it might be noted that by eliminating the letter E, Perec (an orphan, and a Jew who survived WWII) is now unable to say the words je, mère, père, famille, Dieu, France, l'Europe, or indeed his own name (not to mention existentialisme)... but he keeps trying to find it. And all that the characters ever come across in their search for A Vowl is a strange symbol, that none of them can decipher. It looks like this:

E

5/5.

La Vie: Mode d'Emploi (Life: A User's Manual) published in 1978 - apparently it took him 9 years to write it, and I don't doubt it for a second - is considered Perec's masterpiece. And while it's not so much FUN as A Void, it's certainly impressive. This novel - if indeed it can be called a novel - is basically a literary jigsaw puzzle. The setting is a Paris apartment building with 99 rooms; the framework of the story is one single afternoon in 1975, and each of the 99 chapters describes what is happening - or not happening - in each room in this precise moment in time. In a way, the novel is sort of a mimeogram or whatever you want to call it; each chapter lists the objects found in each room - something which does, unfortunately, make the book a bit repetitive - as well as the people. One of Perec's most common themes, it seems, is memory; not just one person's memories, but the collective memories of a people (one of his novels, Je Me Souviens, is apparently made up entirely of sentences like "I remember [insert object/person/song/whatever]"). And the building in Life contains the flotsam and jetsam of the entire 19th and 20th centuries; people from all over Europe and all walks of life, the young and the old, the keepsakes of their ancestors, and of course the stories. Because each chapter also contains a short story - sometimes VERY short, sometimes tens of pages - describing how they got here, what other people they ran in to, the wars, the technology, the literature, the... well, all the facets of history, both personal and international.

Part of the framework is the story of one of the tenants, Bartlebooth, who as a bored young wealthy man sets himself what looks like a completely pointless task: he will spend 10 years learning how to paint, 20 years travelling around the world painting, then have his paintings sawed into jigsaw puzzles and spend the next 20 years laying those puzzles. After he's done, the paintings will be restored, shipped back to the places they were painted, and destroyed again so that nothing remains. And the entire novel IS a puzzle, one which takes much more than one read-through to complete; there are tons of interconnected storylines, objects that show up in several places, people that meet and influence each other's lives and then split apart again, circumstances ranging from the hilarious to the utterly tragic, and just... life. Someone said it was a book one could live in.

In a way, I suppose it's a story of how we see the world. Any three things, one of the character points out, can be seen as part of a pattern; any two jigsaw puzzle pieces can turn out to fit together. It's all about how we connect the dots. One read-through isn't nearly enough to connect them all, but I'm not sure if that's the point either; so many of the pieces - the stories - are beautiful/funny/fascinating in their own right, and I'm perfectly happy for now to have picked each one up, turned it around a couple of times, and put it in a pile next to some others that I think it might fit with.

4/5.

I'm going to try and read more Perec in the future. It would be so much easier if I spoke French...

 

[Kenny Shovel]

I’ve read a little of Perec and have been left with mixed feelings. ‘Life: A User’s Manual’ is a book that has stayed with me a long time, or at least the story of Bartlebooth has. I must have read it 20 years ago when I was in my teens and perhaps too young or too inexperienced a reader to pick up on the constrictions Perec was placing on himself. It’s only since reading some of his other books that I went back and mentally re-examined LAUM. It is a wonderful book, although as you note, the constraints he uses result in some rather tedious lists. Two decades on I can still remember the frustration I felt at one particular chapter where he seemed determined to note every last detail of a room – it all seemed so pointless. But I guess that’s the reason Bartlebooths story is so central to the book. The constraints Bartlebooth places on his life mirror those that the author imposes upon his work, and we are asked to judge if the results are ultimately pointless or not.

Of the other books of his I can recommend ‘W, or, the Memory of Childhood’, but I can’t say the same of ‘Three’. ‘Three’ contains ‘The Exeter Text’ a kind of half-brother to ‘A Void’ (message from the translator I wonder?) with e’s a plenty but no other vowels. This just left me cold - experimentation for the sake of it. If I ever get my way through all the great novels of the world I may return to ‘A Void’, but not before.

Regards,

K-S

 

[beer good]

Of the other books of his I can recommend ‘W, or, the Memory of Childhood’,

This is probably next on my Perec list, yeah; I'm somewhat constrained (!) by what books are available in translation, obviously, but W should be possible to find. Plus, I need to find out if there's any connection to LAUM -

Spoiler

the last puzzle piece that Bartlebooth holds on to as he dies is shaped as a W

!

 

[Kenny Shovel]

...I need to find out if there's any connection to LAUM...

I read the books 15 or so years apart, so wasn't really looking for any connection.

Spoiler

Although, you could argue the puzzle piece that Bartlebooth holds as he dies (shaped as a W) represents his life, and W is an autobiagraphical work. But I may be stretching a point...

 

[beer good]

Well, I finally got around to it.

W Or The Memory Of Childhood (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, 1974)

Someone said they found W Or The Memory Of Childhood cryptic, I disagree - apart from the narrative shift in the W story halfway through, it seemed perfectly straightforward. Well, as straightforward as Perec gets when he tells at least two supposedly unrelated stories at the same time.

Because that's the heart of a lot of Perec's writing; that there's something there that's too big, too horrible, and yet too unknown to talk about except by very conspicuously not talking about it. All his oulipo tricks can look like nothing but experimentation, but at the core there's always an absence, an attempt to write around something that can't be said because there are no words for it.

So W Or The Memory Of Childhood is part memoir - from memory, which is ironic, since as he points out, he was too young to remember much about his parents (father killed in WWII, mother gassed in Auschwitz) or most of his childhood. All his memories are reconstructed from stories he's been told later, pictures he's seen so many times he remembers being there even though he wasn't, disconnected fragments of memories that he knows can't be correct since they're contradicted by facts. His memories of his childhood are based on his teenage memories of his childhood which are based on... what?

The other part is the story, the childhood fantasy; On the island of W (that's a symbol, not a letter), mankind has freed itself of political ideologies, pointless high-brow art, sickness and industry. What remains in this utopia is just playing, a nation founded on Olympic ideals, where you never get to grow up, just run and throw and wrestle and compete for useless medals all your life. Except then the adult Perec slowly steps in and starts looking at where the story the young Perec dreamed up inevitably leads, and... woah. Woah.

The two stories complement each other, rarely in an obvious way but still almost perfectly, one drawing up the lines and the other colouring. In his memoirs, Perec is often surprisingly matter-of-fact. Facts and vague memories are all he has to go on, after all; he was orphaned, not just from a family but from an entire culture, an entire Europe, left with a misspelt name far too early to know what he lost. He can only approach it in stories, and in those, he can never get around that big hole. When he finally removes the last veil at the end of W, the effect is pretty devastating.

 

[beer good]

Perec at 75: Man of letters, with exceptions | The Australian

Yes, he would only have been 75 this month. What a loss.