This biography of Georges Perec (1936-1982), novelist, poet, verbal gamesman, and master puzzler, whom Italo Calvino called, 'so singular a literary personality that he bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else,' is very lucidly presented. The biographer, David Bellos, also the English translator of Perec's books, has written such an interesting book that it almost reads like a fictional account of Perec's life. It is extremely well researched and documented. Examples of Perec's typewriter art, which he did mostly while working as a technician in a Neurophysiology Laboratory in Paris are printed on pages 260 and 690. Alexander Laurence wrote the following book review printed on the Internet 1999.We're all familiar with the term "slacker" and characteristics of the twenty-nothings who populate Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X. These are all attempts to capture a vibrant youth culture that adds to the present time. But what if I were to tell you that the French writer, Georges Perec, wrote about consumer culture and ne'er-do-wells over thirty years ago in his first published novel. Things (1965) is a novel about Jerome and Sylvie, a couple who are students during the Algerian war, who work part-time as research marketers, who wonder most of the time if they are ever to be happy accumulating wealth and consumer goods. Imagine a young Marxist Perec who had attended Roland Barthes' lectures in the sixties trying to write an adventure story.Perec seemed to anticipate many styles that would surface again during the 1980s. Plagiarism and appropriation, those code words for certain conceptual art works, were previously integral to Perec's esthetic. In Things, he plagiarized sentences right out of Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and in Life A User's Manual, he appropriated such Modernists as Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce.This biography by David Bellos is the first complete one about the man who was called "so singular a literary personality that he bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else." Perec enjoyed the early celebrity of Things winning the Renaudot Prize, a book that would be read in French high schools along with first novels by Sartre and Camus. But soon Perec faded from the limelight of the literati while involved in the recording of micro-events, everyday sayings and perceptions, which he called the "infraordinary." In his work, there is the absence of a high literary ambition. He wrote screenplays, acrostics, verbal puns, and he would work and rework his autobiography, W or The Memory of Childhood (1975).Certainly Georges Perec is the most unique writer in France during the last 25 years. He was born in 1936 of Polish parents of Jewish descent. Both parents died during the war: one as a French soldier, the other in a concentration camp. Perec was so unique a writer, that he tried not to repeat himself in the novel form. His activity is legendary. One novel, La Disparation (1969), was a 300-page mystery written without the letter "E," the commonest vowel in French, using a literary form with a long history called the lipogram. Perec's manic interest in constraints, or restrictive forms in writing, produced such marvels as a 5,000 letter palindrome.But of course, his most intriguing creation was Life A User's Manual (1978) which explored the theoretical structure of the Latin bi-square and the clinamen, combining cold forms and passionate writing. Perec was in a group called Oulipo, which colored Perec's writing over his last years. The Oulipo was formed in 1961 to explore literary restraints, and included both writers and mathematicians. This group also included Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, and American writer Harry Mathews.Perec also wrote crossword puzzles for La Point all his life, traveled, worked a job as a researcher, studied math, and lived a literary life simultaneously. The biographer David Bellos, who translated a few of Perec's novels, does a good job of combining life and literature, and explaining linguistic nuances of Perec's French.Perec's esthetic and life was based on the presence of a planned out literary life, and the absence of his parents and a past. Perec once wrote" "I have no memories of childhood." Memory and imagination seem so vital to a Perec sentence. His life and some of his works were sometimes judged mechanical, but they were also haunted by mortality. He spent part of his last year in bad health as a writer in residence at The University of Queensland in Australia. It was here that Perec wrote his last book, 53 Days, and where his cancer became a major problem. On returning to France, Perec said: "Australia fucked me up."He was practically unknown in America till the translation of Life A User's Manual appeared in 1988, which makes Perec a recent excitement in literature on the level of Felipe Alfau. With the upscaling of translations available, Georges Perec has emerged as a French writer also regarded as a master of contemporary writing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.