53 Days (Verba Mundi) - Hardcover

Perec, Georges

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567920888 ISBN 13: 9781567920888

Publisher: Verba Mundi, 2000

Synopsis

Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) and A Void, was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty-eight, but left extensive drafts and notes supplying the rest of the mystery, as well as numerous twists and subplots. From these notes, his friends and fellow novelists Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud have assembled the elements of the unfinished mystery, along the way providing the reader with a fascinating view into the author's mind as he constructed his literary conundrum.

Absorbing, allusive, and joyously playful, "53 Days" is the ultimate detective story. The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime-writer Robert Serval, who has mysteriously disappeared. Serval has left behind the manuscript of his last, unfinished novel, which may contain clues to his fate. From this beginning, Perec lures the reader into a labyrinth of mirror-stories whose solutions can only be glimpsed before they in turn recede around the corner.

In the tradition of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Perec's "53 Days" is a supremely satisfying, engrossing, and truly original mystery. Like his previous work, it is also "a kaleidoscope of ingenious juxtapositions" (Le Monde) from one of the century's most inventive and important writers. As Harry Mathews has commented, "If death had not prevented Georges Perec from completing this book, we would today be reading a masterpiece, one in the mold of Nabokov's Pale Fire."

About this title

About the Author:

Georges Perec is the author of Life A User's Manual, hailed as "one of the great novels of the century" by (among others) the Times Literary Supplement and The Boston Globe. His other books include W, or The Memory of Childhood; Things: A Story of the Sixties & A Man Asleep, A Void (written--and translated--without the letter e); and 53 Days. Perec died of cancer in 1982.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

About this edition

• Publisher: Verba Mundi
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1567920888
• ISBN 13: 9781567920888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Mathews Harry, Roubaud Jacques