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.
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Long neglected by English-speaking scholars and Perec devotees for the author's other, more flamboyant endeavors, An Attempt... has remained a kind of secret treasure for those interested in Oulipo- and Situationist-inspired tracts of Paris. Marvelously simple and deceptively well-designed, Perec's slim volume presents itself as an artifact of the street, ushering the reader into a spontaneous phenomenology of words, conventional symbols, numbers, fleeting slogans, trajectories, colors, and, as he more technically describes them, means of locomotion, means of carrying, means of traction, degrees of determination or motivation, and body positions. --Erik Morse, bookforum.com, Sept. 24, 2010
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Exercises in style,
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This review is from: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Paperback)
Like Queneau's masterpiece, this tiny gem is an exercise. It does offer diminishing returns, but I highly recommend it, especially for teachers of creative writing or devising performance. It shows the limits and richness of a serious constraint in a far more economical form than "La Disparition."
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