Georges Perec: A Life in Words [Hardcover]

David Bellos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 1993

George Perec is the author of "Life A User's Manual". This aims to provide a comprehensive biography including a full survey of Perec's varied oeuvre, portraying an anguished, comical and ordinary man. The story begins in Eastern Europe before World War I and reaches its penultimate chapter in Australia, where Perec began drafting his last work, the thriller, "53 Days". The pearl trade, the occupation of France, the shoah, the rise and fall of the intellectual post-war France, art history, forgery, travels to Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Italy and Scotland, the Algerian War, neurophysiology, the book business and the radio, television and cinema industries provide the varied backdrops to a life rooted in historical change.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for Life: A User's Manual , French novelist Perec (1936-1982) employed multiple narrative styles, word games, jokes, arcane quotations and other devices to delineate the self's relation to a fragmented world. In this exhaustive biography, a remarkable piece of detective work that should stimulate new interest in Perec's massive output, Bellos examines how Perec, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants to Paris, suffered crippling grief, anger and guilt after losing both his parents in WW II--his father died on the battlefield fighting German soldiers, his mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Bellos, English translator of Perec's novels, discusses his leftist politics and deep ambivalence about his Jewishness; his identification with Kafka; and the intricate connections between Perec's life and art. He also surveys Perec's activities as filmmaker, poet, writer of innovative radio plays, and his participation in the OuLiPo group devoted to the cross-fertilization of literature, mathematics, logic and computer science. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 832 pages
• Publisher: The Harvill Press (November 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0002720221
• ISBN-13: 978-0002720229
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 6.2 x 2.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,217,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Big, complete, but readable, May 24, 2000

By 

Ben Singleton "Cruscotto" (Florence, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Georges Perec: A Life in Words : A Biography (Hardcover)

Bellos' big, exhaustive raccount of the life and works of one of France's most contreversial modern writers is a thorough insight, both into the family background, the struggles of a writer trying to make a living, and the works themselves. Perecs' books, peppered with clues, quizzes and games, are reinterpreted, giving the reader a new incentive to go back to the texts to more fully understand the author, as essentially a "normal" man.