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Penser/Classer
Que me demande-t-on, au juste ? Si je pense avant de classer ? Si je classe avant de penser ? Comment je classe ce que je pense ? Comment je pense quand je veux classer ? [...]
Tellement tentant de vouloir distribuer le monde entier selon un code unique ; une loi universelle régirait l'ensemble des phénomènes : deux hémisphères, cinq continents, masculin et féminin, animal et végétal, singulier pluriel, droite gauche, quatre saisons, cinq sens, six voyelles, sept jours, douze mois, vingt-six lettres.
Malheureusement ça ne marche pas, ça n'a même jamais commencé à marcher, ça ne marchera jamais. N'empêche que l'on continuera encore longtemps à catégoriser tel ou tel animal selon qu'il a un nombre impair de doigts ou des cornes creuses.
Tellement tentant de vouloir distribuer le monde entier selon un code unique ; une loi universelle régirait l'ensemble des phénomènes : deux hémisphères, cinq continents, masculin et féminin, animal et végétal, singulier pluriel, droite gauche, quatre saisons, cinq sens, six voyelles, sept jours, douze mois, vingt-six lettres.
Malheureusement ça ne marche pas, ça n'a même jamais commencé à marcher, ça ne marchera jamais. N'empêche que l'on continuera encore longtemps à catégoriser tel ou tel animal selon qu'il a un nombre impair de doigts ou des cornes creuses.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Georges Perec
139 books1,660 followersGeorges 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.
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.
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May 4, 2020
Do you enjoy making lists? Perhaps lists on books and reading - lists of books you've read, lists of books you want to read, lists of your favorite authors, lists of books you intend reading, lists of books you've reviewed, lists of books you've discussed in book groups or with friends, lists of books you've studied in detail?
Do you enjoyed the way words look and sound by themselves and in combination with other words? Do you like to see words that start with the same letter, words that are synonyms, words that are antonyms, monosyllabic words, compound words (among my personal favorite), obscure words or colorful words?
If your answer is "yes" to more than one of the above, you just might be a prime candidate to fall in love with the writing of Georges Perec, ink slinger in the widest sense of the sentence.
And speaking of sentences, here is my favorite sentence from the back cover of this book, Thoughts of Sorts: "This playful and inventive master of classification and wordplay investigates the ways in which we define our place in the world, reveling in list-making, orientating and classifying."
One couldn't come up with a more apt one-sentence amplification or description, exact explication or pithy portrayal of this splendiferous batch of nifty essays.
Playful and Inventive - Here's a quote from the essay Reading under the section on public transport: "The place for reading is the metro. That could almost be a definition. I continue to be amazed that neither the Minister of Culture nor the Secretary of State for Higher Education has ever exclaimed: "Honourable members should cease forthwith their demands for more money for libraries. The people's true library is the underground!""
Master of classification and wordplay - When speaking on the alphabet in Thoughts of Sorts/Sorts of Thoughts, we read, "The quality code of alphabetical order is not very rich; in fact, it has only three elements: A for excellent, B for less good and Z for rock bottom (in French, really rotten films can be called "Z movies)."
The ways in which we define our place in the world - From Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk: "I do still work now quite often in cafes; but at home it is only once in a blue moon that I work (write) anywhere else than at my desk (for instance, I don't ever really write in bed), and my desk is never used for anything other than my work (once again, as I write these words down I realize that they are not quite correct: two or three times a year; when I give a party, I clear my desk completely, cover it with a paper tablecloth and - like the plank on which I pile my dictionaries - turn it into a serving table)."
Reveling in list-making, orientating and classifying - In Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books, the author has four sub-sections: Ways of sorting books, Books which are very easy to sort, Books which are not too hard to sort and Books which are well-night unsortable.
I included the above quotes and snips as a way highlighting several Georges gumdrops. If you wish to explore the writings of Georges Perec, Thoughts of Sorts is a perfect place to start before moving on to his longer books such as A Void (an entire novel without using the letter "e"), Life: A User's Manual or Species of Spaces.
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April 15, 2024Hints of Obsessiveness, Without Follow-Through
Reading my way through Perec, because how is it possible to stop? This collection of short pieces has some models for prose experiments:
1. "Thoughts of Sorts / Sorts of Thoughts" is fragmentary in an uninteresting way: it could be much more intensively executed, more fictionally complete, more obsessively classificatory. But it makes up for that unaccountable lightness (it seems that it's the product of a waning interest, or a lack of energy) by some wonderful passages, like this:
"THOUGHTS / SORTS
What does the forward slash mean?
What exactly is the question? Whether I think before I sort? Whether I sort before I think?"
And so on. The problem is that there isn't much so on, but no clear reason why there isn't.
2. "I Remember Malet & Isaac" is an inventory of one of Perec's school books, a history of France. He lists the table of contents, then all the words in italics, then just one picture's caption, then everything in boldface. It's also incomplete in a strangely unaccountable way, but it has a great cumulative effect: it makes me share in Perec's impatience with the cobwebby history texts we've all had to read.
3. "Backtracking" is a prose piece about his years in analysis, which manages to sound almost completely decathected by avoiding all talk about substance.
The problem with these pieces, for me, is that knowing "A Void," "W," and "Life: A User's Guide," I am aware he was capable of protracted concentration, which is not at all to say real exhaustiveness or actual classificatory rigor, but rather a more interesting and complex mixture of constraints and constructed sources of freedom.
(These ideas are pursued in my notes on Perec's "A Man Asleep" and "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.")
(Revised April 2024)
Reading my way through Perec, because how is it possible to stop? This collection of short pieces has some models for prose experiments:
1. "Thoughts of Sorts / Sorts of Thoughts" is fragmentary in an uninteresting way: it could be much more intensively executed, more fictionally complete, more obsessively classificatory. But it makes up for that unaccountable lightness (it seems that it's the product of a waning interest, or a lack of energy) by some wonderful passages, like this:
"THOUGHTS / SORTS
What does the forward slash mean?
What exactly is the question? Whether I think before I sort? Whether I sort before I think?"
And so on. The problem is that there isn't much so on, but no clear reason why there isn't.
2. "I Remember Malet & Isaac" is an inventory of one of Perec's school books, a history of France. He lists the table of contents, then all the words in italics, then just one picture's caption, then everything in boldface. It's also incomplete in a strangely unaccountable way, but it has a great cumulative effect: it makes me share in Perec's impatience with the cobwebby history texts we've all had to read.
3. "Backtracking" is a prose piece about his years in analysis, which manages to sound almost completely decathected by avoiding all talk about substance.
The problem with these pieces, for me, is that knowing "A Void," "W," and "Life: A User's Guide," I am aware he was capable of protracted concentration, which is not at all to say real exhaustiveness or actual classificatory rigor, but rather a more interesting and complex mixture of constraints and constructed sources of freedom.
(These ideas are pursued in my notes on Perec's "A Man Asleep" and "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.")
(Revised April 2024)
October 3, 2020
This selection of late essays by Perec was published posthumously. I'm sure that Perec himself wouldn't have seen it as his chef d'oeuvre. It collects articles written for a number of journals and anthologies from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. Some of the selections work better than others, from my perspective. I enjoyed especially Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk, Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books, Reading, On Spectacles, On the Difficulty of Imagining the Good Life and the title piece. And those first three, in particular, provide further insight into Perec as a writer. While I admired I Remember Malet and Isaac and 81 Easy-Cook Recipes for Beginners, they proved a little tiresome to read. Perec is best known as a master of diverse and experimental fictional forms but this volume makes a case for him as a highly accomplished - if somewhat offbeat - essayist.
The title piece, originally Penser/Classer or Think/Classify, considers a very Perecquian problem; how do we categorise and catalogue the world and our experience of it? Until the year that his masterwork, Life a User's Manual was published, Perec worked as an archivist in a medical research library. Classifying was pain et beurre for him. He was a man who loved lists. After all, he's the writer who inserted that infuriating list of mail order DIY products into his aforementioned masterwork. But he also recognised that the world resists our taxonomical urges:
It's so tempting to try to sort out the whole world by a single code... Unfortunately it doesn't work, it's never even had the slightest hope of working, it will never work.
Perec was the great maker of lists who knew that most lists will remain incomplete. Hence there are 100 squares in the Graeco-Latin bi-square from which he composed Life but only 99 chapters. Bartlebooth's attempt to complete the 500 jigsaws he has Winckler create for him is thwarted first by blindness, then by death. Perec was fascinated by the struggle between order and atrophy and this essay explores the theme brilliantly.
It's a great pleasure to read Perec on writers who inspired him (Borges, Verne) and those who were friends and with whom he worked (Jacques Roubaud, Marcel Bénabou). Italo Calvino could be classified under both categories.
Drawn from the latter part of his short life (the title piece was originally published in the year that Perec died) there is occasionally a terrible poignancy to his words. "I'd like to live to be old, but sometimes I wouldn't" he wrote in On the Difficulty of Imagining the Good Life, published in 1981, the year before his death. Speculating on his future need for glasses in On Spectacles, he wrote "My ciliary muscle... will lose its elasticity bit by bit and then my eye will no longer be able to adjust its focus. It happens to all adults from the age of forty-five. I'm forty-four and a half..." Perec didn't live to see his forty-sixth birthday.
We get two introductions for the price of one; translator, David Bellos's thoughts on the pieces, followed by a more general one from Margaret Drabble, who latterly became an admirer of Perec's work. Overall, this was an entertaining collection, if somewhat slighter than Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
The title piece, originally Penser/Classer or Think/Classify, considers a very Perecquian problem; how do we categorise and catalogue the world and our experience of it? Until the year that his masterwork, Life a User's Manual was published, Perec worked as an archivist in a medical research library. Classifying was pain et beurre for him. He was a man who loved lists. After all, he's the writer who inserted that infuriating list of mail order DIY products into his aforementioned masterwork. But he also recognised that the world resists our taxonomical urges:
It's so tempting to try to sort out the whole world by a single code... Unfortunately it doesn't work, it's never even had the slightest hope of working, it will never work.
Perec was the great maker of lists who knew that most lists will remain incomplete. Hence there are 100 squares in the Graeco-Latin bi-square from which he composed Life but only 99 chapters. Bartlebooth's attempt to complete the 500 jigsaws he has Winckler create for him is thwarted first by blindness, then by death. Perec was fascinated by the struggle between order and atrophy and this essay explores the theme brilliantly.
It's a great pleasure to read Perec on writers who inspired him (Borges, Verne) and those who were friends and with whom he worked (Jacques Roubaud, Marcel Bénabou). Italo Calvino could be classified under both categories.
Drawn from the latter part of his short life (the title piece was originally published in the year that Perec died) there is occasionally a terrible poignancy to his words. "I'd like to live to be old, but sometimes I wouldn't" he wrote in On the Difficulty of Imagining the Good Life, published in 1981, the year before his death. Speculating on his future need for glasses in On Spectacles, he wrote "My ciliary muscle... will lose its elasticity bit by bit and then my eye will no longer be able to adjust its focus. It happens to all adults from the age of forty-five. I'm forty-four and a half..." Perec didn't live to see his forty-sixth birthday.
We get two introductions for the price of one; translator, David Bellos's thoughts on the pieces, followed by a more general one from Margaret Drabble, who latterly became an admirer of Perec's work. Overall, this was an entertaining collection, if somewhat slighter than Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
January 9, 2018
A read-through for the second time. I have decided to re-read some titles from my library at home. "Thoughts of Sorts" is the ultimate writer's book, in that Georges Perec is a writer who writes about the every-day in the sense what is around us on a daily basis. His chapter on glasses and how one wears glasses, or how one can arrange their library of books, and hysterically his cooking receipes which are basically all the same except adding a different sauce to the dish. In the end of the read, Perec is really about being a writer and how one captures the world around them in details that most wouldn't notice or bother even to write about. Perec captures those moments - usually in a hysterical mode.
A book of loose ends. A collection of Perec's writings that were published in small publications in France. So for sure not a major work, yet Perec is a major 20th Century writer. And a very charming one at that. If the avant-garde has any charm, then Georges Perec is a good gateway to that world.
Obsessed with lists, puzzles, knowledge of things not important -is the glue or magnet that attracts Perec''s attention. The short piece on what is on his work desk is worth the price of the book alone.
A book of loose ends. A collection of Perec's writings that were published in small publications in France. So for sure not a major work, yet Perec is a major 20th Century writer. And a very charming one at that. If the avant-garde has any charm, then Georges Perec is a good gateway to that world.
Obsessed with lists, puzzles, knowledge of things not important -is the glue or magnet that attracts Perec''s attention. The short piece on what is on his work desk is worth the price of the book alone.
February 4, 2021
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος ή Ήν εν αρχή ο λόγος; Να μια ερώτηση που δεν θα έπρεπε να κάνουμε ποτέ στον γλυκύτατο γραφιά George Perec. Ένας πραγματικός λογοτέχνης που μπορούσε να φτιάχνει λογοτεχνία από το τίποτα. Η ματιά του είναι ικανή να μεταμορφώνει το καθημερινό, το τετριμμένο σε ποιητικότητα του εφήμερου και του τυχαίου. Μέλος της ομάδας Oulipo (εργαστήριο δυνητικής λογοτεχνίας ) μιας ομάδας αποτελούμενης τόσο από λόγιους όσο και από μαθηματικούς με σκοπό τον πειραματισμό, την εναλλακτική χρήση της γλώσσας και τον προγραμματισμό του γραπτού λόγου. Έτσι στην συλλογή αυτών των δοκιμίων παρελαύνουν τα αντικείμενα που βρίσκονται πάνω στο γραφείο του, τα δωμάτια που έχει κοιμηθεί ,ο τρόπος που ταξινομεί τα βιβλία του, η μόδα, η άποψη του για τα γυαλιά, την ψυχανάλυση, λήμματα από εγχειρίδια ιστορίας, συνταγές μαγειρικής, η ανάγνωση ως κοινωνικό- φυσιολογικό σκιαγράφημα, η περιγραφή μιας ιδανικής πόλη μόνο με ΔΕΝ και εν κατακλείδι μια σύνοψη για την Σκέψη/ Ταξινόμηση. Ένα οργανωμένο αρχειοθετημένο χάος μια επιμελημένη ατημελησία που μόνο η συγκέντρωση, η συσσώρευση , η κατηγοριοποίηση η απλή απογραφή ως αυθαίρετη αναγκαιότητα μπορεί να επιφέρει ένα νόημα.
January 5, 2021
(I’m reviewing the Notting Hill Edition version of this book, which I’m only noting because it’s one of the most physically pleasing books of its kind I’ve ever read)
For years I’ve been plagued by a brain that rarely shuts up, generating far more ideas than I know what to do with and literally filling up a box with things that just occur to me on the way to the kitchen or waiting for the bus or filling the kettle. Many mornings I wake up to find I have left notes for myself on my phone which I have no recollection of writing (today: “Bill Mantric, swarthy cop, and tiny musician nemesis Gunter Graff, who thinks records are somewhat disappointing” which I *think* related to a current project but might not be). And it’s always bothered me that I have to sift through terrible ideas to find good ones and sometimes get rid of great ones and settle on a bad one. If only there was some way I could do something with all this nonsense?
Well Perec might be the way forward. For a man who died so relatively young he seems to have been desperate to pack in as much as he possibly could into those years. His most respected work - Life: A User’s Manual (which I am gearing up to read, this being the starter to that large banquet) - notoriously tries to record as many details about a moment stopped in time as it can, and that same keenness of eye and quickness of mind is all through this book. Perec seems to write about anything and everything he can think of and does it so wittily and brilliantly it’s dazzling. It’s a beautifully structured book, starting with simpler pieces, working towards bigger and more thoughtful essays on books, reading and the organisation of volumes and then gets a bit abstract with the cookery chapter before culminating with Thoughts of Sorts itself, a dazzling piece with multiple clever meanings all about organising ideas and expressing those ideas and - literally - so so much more
What I love about it particularly is that Perec is always playful, as befits a leading light in Oulipo. He doesn’t write to obfuscate, he writes to try and match the outpouring of ideas and concepts around him. It’s enchanting and enthusiastic and witty and warm and often very funny. You suspect that he partly embraced the restraints of Oulipo because otherwise there would just too much to process. I’ve long found the thought of filling a page with drawings about *anything* kind of panic inducing, but give me a topic or a subject or even a constraint and you’ve got a way of channelling or subverting an idea. It’s also, i suspect, a very autism spectrum way of looking at the world too... it becomes a puzzle in desperate need of a quick and witty solution. So much of this book feels like challenges to find something to say on, say, glasses and Perec extemporising wittily at length like he’s playing a game with you. It’s genuinely infectious and joyously erudite
Margaret Drabble’s introduction is also fascinating and fizzing with ideas about Perec and his writing and the British antecedents of Oulipo (basically mostly BS Johnson it seems). A brilliant little volume and already an all time favourite
For years I’ve been plagued by a brain that rarely shuts up, generating far more ideas than I know what to do with and literally filling up a box with things that just occur to me on the way to the kitchen or waiting for the bus or filling the kettle. Many mornings I wake up to find I have left notes for myself on my phone which I have no recollection of writing (today: “Bill Mantric, swarthy cop, and tiny musician nemesis Gunter Graff, who thinks records are somewhat disappointing” which I *think* related to a current project but might not be). And it’s always bothered me that I have to sift through terrible ideas to find good ones and sometimes get rid of great ones and settle on a bad one. If only there was some way I could do something with all this nonsense?
Well Perec might be the way forward. For a man who died so relatively young he seems to have been desperate to pack in as much as he possibly could into those years. His most respected work - Life: A User’s Manual (which I am gearing up to read, this being the starter to that large banquet) - notoriously tries to record as many details about a moment stopped in time as it can, and that same keenness of eye and quickness of mind is all through this book. Perec seems to write about anything and everything he can think of and does it so wittily and brilliantly it’s dazzling. It’s a beautifully structured book, starting with simpler pieces, working towards bigger and more thoughtful essays on books, reading and the organisation of volumes and then gets a bit abstract with the cookery chapter before culminating with Thoughts of Sorts itself, a dazzling piece with multiple clever meanings all about organising ideas and expressing those ideas and - literally - so so much more
What I love about it particularly is that Perec is always playful, as befits a leading light in Oulipo. He doesn’t write to obfuscate, he writes to try and match the outpouring of ideas and concepts around him. It’s enchanting and enthusiastic and witty and warm and often very funny. You suspect that he partly embraced the restraints of Oulipo because otherwise there would just too much to process. I’ve long found the thought of filling a page with drawings about *anything* kind of panic inducing, but give me a topic or a subject or even a constraint and you’ve got a way of channelling or subverting an idea. It’s also, i suspect, a very autism spectrum way of looking at the world too... it becomes a puzzle in desperate need of a quick and witty solution. So much of this book feels like challenges to find something to say on, say, glasses and Perec extemporising wittily at length like he’s playing a game with you. It’s genuinely infectious and joyously erudite
Margaret Drabble’s introduction is also fascinating and fizzing with ideas about Perec and his writing and the British antecedents of Oulipo (basically mostly BS Johnson it seems). A brilliant little volume and already an all time favourite
May 18, 2020
Hay partes del libro que me gustaron como para 5 estrellas, pero algunas enumeraciones resultaron excesivas para mí, como las de las recetas, por ejemplo.
Un libro difícil de clasificar.
Un libro difícil de clasificar.
November 20, 2021
Worth reading even if only for the titular essay (which is a hoot if you’re into formally innovative essays — think of Guy Davenport or Eliot Weinberger) but the amateur sociological pieces are fun too. Also, for the uninitiated, not a terrible place to get started with Perec, who would have won the Nobel Prize had he lived past the age of 45.
November 6, 2013
While reading more than a few of the essays in this collection, I was struck by the feeling that I've read them before. I haven't checked, so that may be true, or it may not. The mere fact that I don't remember actually made reading this very work resonate all the more. In addition to examining categorization and classification, a staple of Perec is the investigation of memory. Nabokov: consciousness::Perec is to memory; Wallace: solipsism::Perec is to memory; Vonnegut:humanism::Perec is to memory. You get it--I just liked writing that because it allowed me to think about all of my favorite authors. Then I got to imagining what it would be like for those four to sit around and shoot the shit for while. Boy would I love to hear that.
But I digress.
I would argue that digression is another of Perec's "modes" of writing. This lies in his ability to look/think beyond the obvious. For example, in "Three Bedrooms Remembered," he writes about three bedrooms he remembers. YET it is amazing how much we can learn about him simply from so utterly simple a concept; he includes the memories associated with each physical locale. This begs readers--or at least it begged me--to follow the same thought process: "Hmmm...where have I slept? What memories immediately spring to mind when I recall that place?" It's really a fun little game of introspection. That, by the way, is why I categorized this as fitting on me "being-a-human" shelf.
One of the many things I love about Perec is that his writing (much like DFW's) is really a window into the workings of his mind. A glimpse into those windows often reveals the same concerns/insecurities/questions that we all--or I at least--have (albeit much more cogent and nicely worded).
Favorite Quotations:
-"...[a new book] would be one more attempt at defining my place, a somewhat oblique approach to daily lie as I live it in practice, a way of talking about my work, my own history and my preoccupations, an effort to pinpoint something which is a part of my experience of the world not in terms of the reflection it casts in distant places, but at the point where it actually breaks surface" (16 my italics).
-"For the plain and obvious facts that we don't bother about or acknowledge, the kinds of things that 'go without saying' -- these facts, though we may like to think that we don't have to describe them, describe us nonetheless" (87).
But I digress.
I would argue that digression is another of Perec's "modes" of writing. This lies in his ability to look/think beyond the obvious. For example, in "Three Bedrooms Remembered," he writes about three bedrooms he remembers. YET it is amazing how much we can learn about him simply from so utterly simple a concept; he includes the memories associated with each physical locale. This begs readers--or at least it begged me--to follow the same thought process: "Hmmm...where have I slept? What memories immediately spring to mind when I recall that place?" It's really a fun little game of introspection. That, by the way, is why I categorized this as fitting on me "being-a-human" shelf.
One of the many things I love about Perec is that his writing (much like DFW's) is really a window into the workings of his mind. A glimpse into those windows often reveals the same concerns/insecurities/questions that we all--or I at least--have (albeit much more cogent and nicely worded).
Favorite Quotations:
-"...[a new book] would be one more attempt at defining my place, a somewhat oblique approach to daily lie as I live it in practice, a way of talking about my work, my own history and my preoccupations, an effort to pinpoint something which is a part of my experience of the world not in terms of the reflection it casts in distant places, but at the point where it actually breaks surface" (16 my italics).
-"For the plain and obvious facts that we don't bother about or acknowledge, the kinds of things that 'go without saying' -- these facts, though we may like to think that we don't have to describe them, describe us nonetheless" (87).
August 14, 2024
Secondo me un Perec monotono, un'idea interessante ma protratta per troppe pagine. Uno schema lineare che annoia facilmente e privo di contenuti esistenziali.
October 31, 2021
Enfin quelqu'un qui comprend ma passion pour les listes et le classement.
March 9, 2011
I really liked a few of these essays ("Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books," "Reading," "Thoughts of Sorts/Sorts of Thoughts," "Notes from the Objects to Be Found on My Desk"), others not so much. Some of them are more like notes for future essays, and while that was charming, sometimes I wished I could just read the actual essay that was never written.
April 8, 2021
Il s'agit d'un recueil d'essais brefs que Perec avait publiés à droite et à gauche à la fin des années 1970, et dont la réunion judicieuse autant que posthume (certains n'étant pas sans se faire écho) est due à son ami, l'éditeur Maurice Olender. Il s'ouvre sur un texte bref, "Notes sur ce que je cherche", où l'auteur de "La Vie mode d'emploi" se montre curieux des expériences littéraires les plus variées, à la recherche d'un idéal littéraire fuyant par nature : à l'instant où il l'aurait précisément formulé, il cesserait d'écrire. Cette envie de diversité ne l'empêche cependant pas de reconnaître quatre grandes directions dans son travail, dont trois (la perspective sociologique, la perspective autobiographique, la perspective ludique et oulipienne) sont parfaitement représentées dans ce petit recueil ; seule la quatrième, fictionnelle et feuilletonnesque, manque ici à l'appel. Perec remarque lui-même que ces directions de travail ne s'excluent pas, que l'une ou l'autre peut dominer telle ou telle oeuvre mais que les autres s'y manifestent ; et c'est souvent le cas ici.
Du côté du ludisme on placera "De la difficulté qu'il y a à imaginer une cité idéale" qui rejoint les rêveries alphabétiques qui hantent l'oeuvre de Perec, et "81 fiches-cuisine à l'usage des débutants" qui applique modestement au genre de la fiche-cuisine, mais avec un développement intégral, le procédé des "Cent mille milliards de poèmes" de Queneau, sauf qu'ici il n'y a pas dix puissance quatorze poèmes mais trois puissance quatre recettes, chacune pourvue d'un titre et souvent d'un ingrédient-surprise. Les lire toutes n'est pas nécessaire pour éclater d'un grand rire nerveux. Ne les essayez pas, faire cuire des filets de sole quarante minutes au four risque de ne donner que des résultats carbonifères. "Je me souviens de Malet & Isaac" est une succession de dépouillements, selon des critères typographiques, de vieux manuels d'histoire ; la question du souvenir est évidemment centrale mais Perec, par la mise en évidence d'expressions-clef, suggère en quelques pages toute une mémoire culturelle commune.
Sur le versant autobiographique on trouvera les "Notes concernant les objets qui sont sur ma table de travail", qui pourtant rejoint aussi la fascination pour le concret des "Choses", son roman le plus évidemment sociologique, et qui se retrouve dans les "Considérations sur les lunettes" qui sont à première vue un texte purement humoristique, et qui pourtant se conclut sur une note encore plus mélancolique que Perec n'en avait sans doute l'intention : une réflexion sur le temps qui passe et qui faisait approcher la date où il aurait à porter cet utile accessoire, date qui n'est jamais venue puisqu'il est mort un an plus tard. "Trois chambres retrouvées" se rattache au thème central de "W ou le souvenir d'enfance" : la difficulté à disposer de ses souvenirs. Contemporaine de la rédaction du même chef-d'oeuvre est l'analyse dont Perec rend compte dans "Les Lieux d'une ruse", racontant le processus puisque "W", très probablement, raconte le résultat.
Sur le versant sociologique (qui n'est pas absent, vous allez le comprendre, des "Considérations sur les lunettes") Perec se fait explicitement le disciple de Marcel Mauss et propose quelques notes suggérant une sociologie du corps et de sa posture, par exemple dans "Notes brèves sur l'art et la manière de ranger les livres" (évidemment parent, de façon transversale, de l'essai sur sa table de travail) et surtout dans "Douze regards obliques" qui propose une analyse acide sur le système de la mode et plus encore "Lire : esquisse socio-physiologique" qui aborde la lecture non pas sous l'angle théorique qui était abondamment développé à la même période par les meilleurs théoriciens — et qui n'a pas cessé de l'être en réalité — mais sous celui, extrêmement pratique, des gestes et postures du lecteur, des lieux et des temps favorables à la lecture. Enfin "De quelques emplois du verbe habiter" s'intéresse surtout aux compléments dudit verbe et montre la variété extraordinaire des indications que l'on peut donner, selon le contexte, sur son domicile.
Même s'agissant de textes de prétentions et de dimensions modestes, c'est toujours un régal de lire la prose pétillante de Perec ; celui-ci s'inquiète de passer pour un caméléon, mais on le reconnaîtrait presque infailliblement, j'en suis sûr, à son humour affable et joueur, à son goût pour la vie concrète qui me paraît exprimer une pure et simple jubilation d'exister au-delà de toutes les angoisses plus ou moins secrètes qui parcourent son travail, une sorte de choix délibéré du bibelot, de l'apéro, de la texture d'un vêtement, de l'observation du corps (souvenir obsédant des lectures d'enfance où l'on se plonge absolument, et à plat ventre sur son lit), face aux deuils insoutenables et à la cruauté de l'Histoire. Autre caractère remarquable, le goût de cet immense architecte capable de constructions vertigineuses pour le fragment, pour une pensée discontinue que l'on observe souvent ici en concurrence avec des interventions structurées plus classiquement. À ce titre, les "Douze regards obliques" sont remarquables, n'imposant leur unité de propos qu'au fur et à mesure de la lecture des paragraphes, de même que la contrainte qui régit "De la difficulté qu'il y a à imaginer une cité idéale", qui se présente comme une simple liste, un texte à déclencheur comme "Je me souviens", n'apparaît que progressivement.
C'est ce que théorise l'essai-titre, placé en dernier dans le recueil. Alors que le premier propose une classification des oeuvres de l'auteur lui-même, en même temps qu'une critique de cette classification (que j'ai tâché d'illustrer en la suivant tout en suggérant des parentés transversales), et le dernier, qui se trouve l'être aussi dans l'ordre chronologique des pré-publications détourne la commande d'une revue pour contester l'idée même de classement, en tant qu'elle impose une hiérarchie (le cinéphile Perec fait remarquer que même l'ordre alphabétique, parfaitement arbitraire, est utilisé pour hiérarchiser, puisqu'on trouve des films de série B ou Z) — d'ailleurs Perec choisit de le bouleverser pour énumérer ses paragraphes — et rêve sur les exemples d'énumération pure proposés par Borges (avec qui il rivalise brillamment) ou Sei Shônagon.
À un moment de ce livre, c'était inévitable, Perec évoque ses tiroirs. Que ceux-ci aient eu d'aussi beaux fonds fait partie de sa grandeur de scrivain.
Du côté du ludisme on placera "De la difficulté qu'il y a à imaginer une cité idéale" qui rejoint les rêveries alphabétiques qui hantent l'oeuvre de Perec, et "81 fiches-cuisine à l'usage des débutants" qui applique modestement au genre de la fiche-cuisine, mais avec un développement intégral, le procédé des "Cent mille milliards de poèmes" de Queneau, sauf qu'ici il n'y a pas dix puissance quatorze poèmes mais trois puissance quatre recettes, chacune pourvue d'un titre et souvent d'un ingrédient-surprise. Les lire toutes n'est pas nécessaire pour éclater d'un grand rire nerveux. Ne les essayez pas, faire cuire des filets de sole quarante minutes au four risque de ne donner que des résultats carbonifères. "Je me souviens de Malet & Isaac" est une succession de dépouillements, selon des critères typographiques, de vieux manuels d'histoire ; la question du souvenir est évidemment centrale mais Perec, par la mise en évidence d'expressions-clef, suggère en quelques pages toute une mémoire culturelle commune.
Sur le versant autobiographique on trouvera les "Notes concernant les objets qui sont sur ma table de travail", qui pourtant rejoint aussi la fascination pour le concret des "Choses", son roman le plus évidemment sociologique, et qui se retrouve dans les "Considérations sur les lunettes" qui sont à première vue un texte purement humoristique, et qui pourtant se conclut sur une note encore plus mélancolique que Perec n'en avait sans doute l'intention : une réflexion sur le temps qui passe et qui faisait approcher la date où il aurait à porter cet utile accessoire, date qui n'est jamais venue puisqu'il est mort un an plus tard. "Trois chambres retrouvées" se rattache au thème central de "W ou le souvenir d'enfance" : la difficulté à disposer de ses souvenirs. Contemporaine de la rédaction du même chef-d'oeuvre est l'analyse dont Perec rend compte dans "Les Lieux d'une ruse", racontant le processus puisque "W", très probablement, raconte le résultat.
Sur le versant sociologique (qui n'est pas absent, vous allez le comprendre, des "Considérations sur les lunettes") Perec se fait explicitement le disciple de Marcel Mauss et propose quelques notes suggérant une sociologie du corps et de sa posture, par exemple dans "Notes brèves sur l'art et la manière de ranger les livres" (évidemment parent, de façon transversale, de l'essai sur sa table de travail) et surtout dans "Douze regards obliques" qui propose une analyse acide sur le système de la mode et plus encore "Lire : esquisse socio-physiologique" qui aborde la lecture non pas sous l'angle théorique qui était abondamment développé à la même période par les meilleurs théoriciens — et qui n'a pas cessé de l'être en réalité — mais sous celui, extrêmement pratique, des gestes et postures du lecteur, des lieux et des temps favorables à la lecture. Enfin "De quelques emplois du verbe habiter" s'intéresse surtout aux compléments dudit verbe et montre la variété extraordinaire des indications que l'on peut donner, selon le contexte, sur son domicile.
Même s'agissant de textes de prétentions et de dimensions modestes, c'est toujours un régal de lire la prose pétillante de Perec ; celui-ci s'inquiète de passer pour un caméléon, mais on le reconnaîtrait presque infailliblement, j'en suis sûr, à son humour affable et joueur, à son goût pour la vie concrète qui me paraît exprimer une pure et simple jubilation d'exister au-delà de toutes les angoisses plus ou moins secrètes qui parcourent son travail, une sorte de choix délibéré du bibelot, de l'apéro, de la texture d'un vêtement, de l'observation du corps (souvenir obsédant des lectures d'enfance où l'on se plonge absolument, et à plat ventre sur son lit), face aux deuils insoutenables et à la cruauté de l'Histoire. Autre caractère remarquable, le goût de cet immense architecte capable de constructions vertigineuses pour le fragment, pour une pensée discontinue que l'on observe souvent ici en concurrence avec des interventions structurées plus classiquement. À ce titre, les "Douze regards obliques" sont remarquables, n'imposant leur unité de propos qu'au fur et à mesure de la lecture des paragraphes, de même que la contrainte qui régit "De la difficulté qu'il y a à imaginer une cité idéale", qui se présente comme une simple liste, un texte à déclencheur comme "Je me souviens", n'apparaît que progressivement.
C'est ce que théorise l'essai-titre, placé en dernier dans le recueil. Alors que le premier propose une classification des oeuvres de l'auteur lui-même, en même temps qu'une critique de cette classification (que j'ai tâché d'illustrer en la suivant tout en suggérant des parentés transversales), et le dernier, qui se trouve l'être aussi dans l'ordre chronologique des pré-publications détourne la commande d'une revue pour contester l'idée même de classement, en tant qu'elle impose une hiérarchie (le cinéphile Perec fait remarquer que même l'ordre alphabétique, parfaitement arbitraire, est utilisé pour hiérarchiser, puisqu'on trouve des films de série B ou Z) — d'ailleurs Perec choisit de le bouleverser pour énumérer ses paragraphes — et rêve sur les exemples d'énumération pure proposés par Borges (avec qui il rivalise brillamment) ou Sei Shônagon.
À un moment de ce livre, c'était inévitable, Perec évoque ses tiroirs. Que ceux-ci aient eu d'aussi beaux fonds fait partie de sa grandeur de scrivain.
February 4, 2021
A fairly quirky and reasonably interesting collection of small essays and thoughts on various different subjects. Wasn't overly impressed with it but there were some decent bits as follows:
There could be an art of writing based on an interplay between the predictable and the unpredictable, between expectation and its disappointment, between collusion and surprise.
I've always been the sort of person who enjoys reading. When I have nothing else to do I read. Charlie Brown.
For reading is not just reading a text, decoding science, plowing through lines, exploring pages, traversing meanings; it is not just the abstract communion of author and reader, the mystical wedding of the idea and the ear. It is also and simultaneously the noise of the Metro or the swaying of the rail carriage, or the heat of the sun on the beach and the shouting of the children playing further along.
There could be an art of writing based on an interplay between the predictable and the unpredictable, between expectation and its disappointment, between collusion and surprise.
I've always been the sort of person who enjoys reading. When I have nothing else to do I read. Charlie Brown.
For reading is not just reading a text, decoding science, plowing through lines, exploring pages, traversing meanings; it is not just the abstract communion of author and reader, the mystical wedding of the idea and the ear. It is also and simultaneously the noise of the Metro or the swaying of the rail carriage, or the heat of the sun on the beach and the shouting of the children playing further along.
April 17, 2021
I would like to put this onto the philosophy shelf. But except for a couple of pages this is just not deep enough. As much as I like lists and as much as I love his lists in the Manual here it is mostly boring.
How about the recipes. I think, I got the point after five or six of his recipes. But there were 75 more.
The essay on glasses may have been best. But it is easy to see how much better it could have been had he put some serious thinking into it. I think he wrote most of the pieces when he was too tired to do serious work. It is still much better than what 99% of people (me included, of course) are capable of. But for a work of Perec this is rather disappointing.
How about the recipes. I think, I got the point after five or six of his recipes. But there were 75 more.
The essay on glasses may have been best. But it is easy to see how much better it could have been had he put some serious thinking into it. I think he wrote most of the pieces when he was too tired to do serious work. It is still much better than what 99% of people (me included, of course) are capable of. But for a work of Perec this is rather disappointing.
May 9, 2021
Un livre assez curieux.
J'ai bien aimé la réflexion sur le thème penser / classer, la pensée et le mouvant qui apparait finalement surtout vers la fin, moins les longues listes et énumérations sans commentaires (recettes de cuisine répétées avec une infime variante, liste de lieux habitables ou non, etc.)
Pour moi, le livre a l'intérêt de traiter d'une manière littéraire et dans un style agréable un problème abordé de manière plus aride en philosophie mais a aussi les limites de ce mode de traitement, c'est-à-dire une certaine superficialité et un propos très allusif qui demande au lecteur de combler la réflexion esquissée.
J'ai bien aimé la réflexion sur le thème penser / classer, la pensée et le mouvant qui apparait finalement surtout vers la fin, moins les longues listes et énumérations sans commentaires (recettes de cuisine répétées avec une infime variante, liste de lieux habitables ou non, etc.)
Pour moi, le livre a l'intérêt de traiter d'une manière littéraire et dans un style agréable un problème abordé de manière plus aride en philosophie mais a aussi les limites de ce mode de traitement, c'est-à-dire une certaine superficialité et un propos très allusif qui demande au lecteur de combler la réflexion esquissée.
August 15, 2020
Un livre passionant. L’idee de classe fait partie du titre, mais le concept d’ensemble se fait presente quand même. Rapports de recherches, souvenirs d’enfance et jeunesse, un bref récit sur l’expérience de faire une psychanalyse, plans futures: “il est à peu près certain qu’un jour, comme un tiers des Français, je porterais des lunettes” Il avait 44 ans et demi. L’Anthropologie en Perec ça fait plaisir.
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July 24, 2023Симпатичен досег до живия ум на Жорж Перек, който отдавна възнамерявах да изследвам, но съвсем случайно се оказа пред очите ми само преди няколко дни и спонтанно пререди останалото. Усеща се отзвук от такива остроумия, каквито би очаквал човек да открие при Калвино или Еко. Леко четиво за по-топли следобеди. Кара те да се замислиш поне малко за реда, който (не) внасяш в света.
July 1, 2024
“Maybe what I am doing is also saying that the question is unanswerable, that thinking refers ultimately to the unthinking underneath it, and that what’s really filed away in well-sorted files, what they serve to mask, ferociously, is the unsortable, the unnameable, and the unsayable…” (p. 121)
April 3, 2025
J'ai alterné les moments de désintérêt total et ceux de passion béate. Il peut me parler de lunettes pendant encore deux cents pages, mais par contre je ne tolérerais pas une recette de lapin de plus. Tout cela n'a aucune logique, mais tant pis.
February 11, 2021
Ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο. Δίνει μια καλή εισαγωγή στον έργο του Perec για όποιον σκοπεύει να ασχοληθεί. Εκθέτει τους βασικούς άξονες που κινείται η σκέψη του και η δουλειά του γενικότερα.
(3,5 αστεράκια)
(3,5 αστεράκια)
September 21, 2024
Περισσότερο μέτριο από καλό αλλά είναι μια καλή εισαγωγή για το πνευμα του Perec.
March 12, 2025
Je me sens si répresentée dans l'écriture de Georges. C'est tout.
October 20, 2025
В тотално недоумение съм за това издание.
October 23, 2025
les gens un peu zinzin vont relate <3
October 29, 2025
Je vais voir si j'y repense, pour l'instant je le classe dans "Livres conseillés par mon père"
November 29, 2025
Salvo solo il primo e l’ultimo testo
December 21, 2025
En tant que grande maniaque, amoureuse des listes et adepte du classement, j’ai beaucoup aimé ce livre qui était d’ailleurs mon premier George Perec.
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