Georges Perec: A Life in Words - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846554209 ISBN 13: 9781846554209

Publisher: The Harvill Press

Synopsis

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesWinner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec".His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete."Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

About this title

About the Author

David Bellos is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. He is well known for his many translations and for his biographies Georges Perec: A Life in Words and Jacques Tati. David Bellos was awarded the first Man Booker International Translator's Prize in 2005 for his translations of Ismail Kadare's novels.

From Booklist

Perec, separated from his Jewish mother and father in the war (the older Perec died as a soldier), grew up in the France of Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Roland Barthes, in an era that held Joyce and Nabokov to be its greatest literary gods. These names give an indication of the nature of Perec's work: playful, puzzling, coded, deconstructing, eccentric, and very much in the camp of not so much a "life in words" as a "life as words." Perec wrote crossword puzzles, recorded in one book all his dreams from a period in the 1960s, wrote moving memoirs of his childhood, authored a film, wrote the world's longest palindrome, and constructed a great "deconstructive" novel (Life: A User's Manual) that actually fails to deconstruct. There is no doubt that Perec was a great original (he died, sadly, at the age of 46), and Bellos, his translator as well as his biographer, has written about as exhaustive a first biography as one is likely to meet. Obviously an item for larger literary collections, it is, nevertheless, an invaluable guide to a great and too-little-known writer's work. Stuart Whitwell

About this edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• ISBN 10: 1846554209
• ISBN 13: 9781846554209
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English