En dialogue avec l'époque

by Georges Perec, Dominique Bertelli (Editor), Mireille Ribiere (Editor)

Cet ouvrage n’entend pas remplacer les deux volumes réunissant les entretiens et conférences donnés par Georges Perec entre 1965 et 1981, et publiés par Joseph K. en 2003 dans une édition critique établie par nos soins. Il vise tout simplement à présenter un aperçu des commentaires de Perec sur son œuvre et son activité d’écrivain.
Les documents réunis dans ce florilège permettent ainsi de suivre à grands pas le cheminement de l’écrivain à partir de l’automne 1965, où son premier roman publié, Les Choses, obtient le prix Renaudot, jusqu’à l’automne 1981, où très sollicité depuis La Vie mode d’emploi qui lui a valu le prix Médicis en 1978 et l’a imposé définitivement sur la scène littéraire, Perec effectue plusieurs séjours à l’étranger.
Si au tournant des années 80 La Vie mode d’emploi reste au cœur de nombreux échanges, l’heure est souvent aux entretiens thématiques (le jeu, la judéité, le rôle de la mémoire et des contraintes), mais aussi aux bilans et retours en arrière : ses interlocuteurs l’invitent ainsi à jeter un regard rétrospectif sur son œuvre et à s’interroger sur son évolution. Autre aspect important des propos de cette époque : l’écrivain s’identifie de plus en plus nettement à la cause de l’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle réuni depuis 1960 autour de Raymond Queneau et François Le Lionnais et au sein duquel Perec a été coopté en 1967.

192 pages, Paperback

About the author

Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.

It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").

W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.

Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.