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Perec, Georges, 1936-1982

 Person

Found in 10 Collections and/or Records:

A Void, 1994

 Item
Identifier: CC-04754-4843
Scope and Contents First published in French as "La Disparition," this novel is written without the using the letter "e" in any of the words. The Sackner Archive holds the French edition which is written the same way. Books written by Adair, a British writer, and published by Writers Forum, are also held by the Sackner Archive. The following is a review of this book from Case Western Reserve University English Department in 1997 that was copied from their Internet site in 1999. Anton Vowl is missing. Slain or just put away, nobody knows, but a similar void now looms for his pals as that group frantically hunts A Void's lost protagonist. Anton is missing also a singular ABC, which graphic mark ought to form part of a sound Vowl and a common "Vowl" sound. Arranging for many such omissions in this book is our lurking author, a lipogrammatic artist and assassin who both plots Vowl's doom and plucks his customary signatorial pictograph. The author is the late Georges Perec, who in 1969 took up the...
Dates: 1994

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, 2010

 Item
Identifier: CC-51577-72676
Scope and Contents

Amazon.com: "One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 2010

Cantatrix Sopranica L.: Et Autres Ecrits Scientifiques, 1991

 Item
Identifier: CC-29118-30463
Scope and Contents

Includes the English version of Perec's famous pseudo-scientific spoof, "Experimental demonstration of the tomatotrophic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)." Other pseudo-scientific writings, one in collaboration with Harry Mathews, appear in their French versions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1991

La disparition, 1983

 Item
Identifier: CC-58914-51772
Scope and Contents

It should be noted that Ernest Vincent Wright in the novel "Gadsby" also wrote a novel without the letter 'e' in 1939. This copy is a reprint of the original novel first printed in 1969. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1983

Life a User's Manual, 1987

 Item
Identifier: CC-32004-33535
Scope and Contents Originally published in French in 1978, this novel is considered to be an outstanding example of twentieth century fiction in the tradition of Canterbury Tales and Ulysses. It is composed of a seies of stories that occur at the same time in an apartment building in the 17th arrondisement of Paris. Fictional but meaningful, the people and events are described in humorous and specific detail. The book is constructed like a puzzle and contains an index and a chronology.WikipedIa: Life A User's Manual (the original title is La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, though Perec himself preferred to avoid labels and his only long term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle.La...
Dates: 1987

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999

 Item
Identifier: CC-43946-46057
Scope and Contents This book is edited with an introduction and translated by John Sturrock. The initial story is about "domestic and urban space and how, these days, we are made to occupy it. This is pure topography: plain to the point of obviousness at times, yet forever veering off into jolly idiosyncrasies of the kind that make Perec so entertainig to read." For example in "Species of Spaces," Perec describes the page, the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment buildlng, the street, the neighborhood, the town, the countryside, Europe, the world and space.Alessandro M Angelini (New York, NY) - Reviewing this book for Amazon.com writes "As the author of the world's longest palindrome and other literary feats, Perec's phenomenal linguistic skills and imagination remain incomparable. His works, however, on not merely experiments within the constraints of language; I am not as impressed with his ability to write a 300-page novel without a single letter "e" as much as his endearing sense of...
Dates: 1999

Things / A Man Asleep, 1990

 Item
Identifier: CC-31441-32931
Scope and Contents

The book consists of two novels. Things deals with a young French lower middle class couple in the post-WWII era who are marketing researchers. They want to be acquire possessions but do not have the necessary job skills or work ethnic to become wealthy. A Man Asleep is an existensionlist story about a nameless person that is written entirely in the second voice. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1990

Three, 1996

 Item
Identifier: CC-43944-46055
Scope and Contents

Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1996

Three, 2004

 Item
Identifier: CC-44199-46325
Scope and Contents

Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 2004

W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988

 Item
Identifier: CC-31305-32778
Scope and Contents

This novel contains two distinct alternating biographies: the first is an allegorical story of W, a bizarre, mythical island civilization, symbolizing the Holocaust. It is printed in italics. The second text is Perec's memories of his childhood in Paris. Perec writes in his introduction that the two stories "are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though neither could exist on its own, as though it was only their coming together, the distant light they cast on each other, that could make apparent what is never quite said in one,never quite said in the other, but said only in their fragile overlapping." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1988