February 18, 2003
Georges Perec
The Center for Book Culture's journal, Context, features a well-written primer by Warren Motte on Georges Perec in their newest issue. I came to Perec via Species of Spaces and Other Pieces; I later read Life A User's Manual and read about A Void and Les Revenentes. This article reminds me to dig in the boxes under my bed and find his books so that I might enjoy them yet again.
A brief passage from the article:
Georges Perec is perhaps best described as a literary experimentalist, one who was intrigued by the question of form. He produced a score of major works, each one quite different from the others. Although he is best known for his novels, he also wrote plays, poetry, essays, filmscripts, opera librettos, and many other texts which confound traditional generic categories. "My ambition as a writer," he explained to an interviewer in 1978, "would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to beaten ground, and to write everything that someone today can possibly write." He once suggested that his work was animated by four major concerns: a passion for the apparently trivial details of everyday life, an impulse toward confession and autobiography, a will toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories.