What do you think?
Rate this book
Georges Perec. Une vie dans les mots
Qui est Georges Perec ? C’est pour répondre à cette question que le traducteur anglais de La Vie mode d’emploi s’est mis en quête de celui qui est, pour beaucoup, l’écrivain le plus novateur de sa génération.
La biographie riche et élégante de David Bellos est la première étude aboutie de l’oeuvre diverse de Perec. Elle dresse le portrait d’une personnalité angoissée, drôle, formidablement douée, et qui en dépit de sa touchante modestie réussit à s’imposer comme l’un des romanciers européens les plus importants de ce siècle.
L’histoire commence dans une famille juive, en Pologne, avant la Première Guerre mondiale. Le commerce de la perle fine, la France sous l’Occupation, la Shoah, la grandeur et la décadence des intellectuels de l’après-guerre, les voyages en Yougoslavie, Tunisie, Italie, Australie, la guerre d’Algérie, les milieux de la neurophysiologie, de l’édition, de la radio, de la télévision et du cinéma tissent la toile de fond d’une vie marquée par les bouleversements de l’Histoire.
Georges Perec connut des débuts difficiles mais fascinants. Puis virent la gloire, avec Les Choses, et la rencontre étonnamment féconde avec l’OULIPO, l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Son œuvre se place résolument en marge, ou plutôt en avance sur son temps.
Cette biographie, fruit de nombreuses années de recherches, véritable roman d’une vie consacrée à la réinvention de l’écriture, est tout à la fois chronique scrupuleuse, une interprétation sensible, un récit divertissant autant qu’émouvant.
David Bellos, est né en 1945 en Angleterre, enseigne le français à l'université de Manchester. Auteur de nombreux articles sur les romanciers français du XIX è siècle, il est également le traducteur anglais de Georges Perec. Cette présente biographie repose sur des recherches menées en France, en Allemagne, en Australie, en Israel, en Tunisie et aux Etats-Unis.
Version française établie à partir de l'anglais par Françoise Cartano et l'auteur
La biographie riche et élégante de David Bellos est la première étude aboutie de l’oeuvre diverse de Perec. Elle dresse le portrait d’une personnalité angoissée, drôle, formidablement douée, et qui en dépit de sa touchante modestie réussit à s’imposer comme l’un des romanciers européens les plus importants de ce siècle.
L’histoire commence dans une famille juive, en Pologne, avant la Première Guerre mondiale. Le commerce de la perle fine, la France sous l’Occupation, la Shoah, la grandeur et la décadence des intellectuels de l’après-guerre, les voyages en Yougoslavie, Tunisie, Italie, Australie, la guerre d’Algérie, les milieux de la neurophysiologie, de l’édition, de la radio, de la télévision et du cinéma tissent la toile de fond d’une vie marquée par les bouleversements de l’Histoire.
Georges Perec connut des débuts difficiles mais fascinants. Puis virent la gloire, avec Les Choses, et la rencontre étonnamment féconde avec l’OULIPO, l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Son œuvre se place résolument en marge, ou plutôt en avance sur son temps.
Cette biographie, fruit de nombreuses années de recherches, véritable roman d’une vie consacrée à la réinvention de l’écriture, est tout à la fois chronique scrupuleuse, une interprétation sensible, un récit divertissant autant qu’émouvant.
David Bellos, est né en 1945 en Angleterre, enseigne le français à l'université de Manchester. Auteur de nombreux articles sur les romanciers français du XIX è siècle, il est également le traducteur anglais de Georges Perec. Cette présente biographie repose sur des recherches menées en France, en Allemagne, en Australie, en Israel, en Tunisie et aux Etats-Unis.
Version française établie à partir de l'anglais par Françoise Cartano et l'auteur
832 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
25 people are currently reading
686 people want to read
About the author
David Bellos
74 books103 followersDavid Bellos is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also a professor of French and comparative literature. He has won many awards for his translations of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare, and others, including the Man Booker International Translator’s Award. He also received the Prix Goncourt for George Perec: A Life in Words.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 18, 2020
Why haven't I previously written a review of this excellent book? How remiss of me! I guess it's because I read it in 2005, before Goodreads existed and long before I became a member. It's become something of a habit with me to read a big literary biography over the summer in Brittany. And they don't come better - or much bigger - than this.
David Bellos was the man best equipped to write the first English language biography of French literary genius, Georges Perec. It was Bellos who produced the 1987 translation of Perec's masterwork, Life a User's Manual, at a time when the writer was barely known in the Anglophone world. It was a gamble, and one that paid off, fortunately, since most of Perec's writings have subsequently been translated into English. For that we owe a debt of gratitude. I can't actually imagine why there would be a second English language biography. Bellos's book defines the term 'definitive'.
In addition to the detailed account of the life and works, there are all sorts of fascinating extras - copious reproductions of charts, lists, matrices, drawings and so on that offer insights into Perec's working methods. When combined with Bellos's translation of 53 Days, the novel Perec had half finished at the time of his death and to which his friends Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud added his notes, we gain access to the way this fascinating writer proceeded. The photographs are terrific too. And that Underwood typewriter!
Bellos is a superb writer. His translations of Perec are testament to that. I was never bored once in all 800 pages of this exhaustive biography. Bellos really brings Perec alive in A Life in Words. At the end, one feels one is mourning a personal friend. Subsequently, I have returned to it, time and again, especially when reading Perec's own work. Bellos proves an erudite and indefatigable guide. For anyone interested in Perec's writing, I can't recommend this biography highly enough. Among other platitudes, it might be described as indispensable. In this case, that happens to be true.
Although he's long been based in NJ, I believe Bellos was brought up in Southend-on-Sea. Well, aren't all the leading intellectuals?
David Bellos was the man best equipped to write the first English language biography of French literary genius, Georges Perec. It was Bellos who produced the 1987 translation of Perec's masterwork, Life a User's Manual, at a time when the writer was barely known in the Anglophone world. It was a gamble, and one that paid off, fortunately, since most of Perec's writings have subsequently been translated into English. For that we owe a debt of gratitude. I can't actually imagine why there would be a second English language biography. Bellos's book defines the term 'definitive'.
In addition to the detailed account of the life and works, there are all sorts of fascinating extras - copious reproductions of charts, lists, matrices, drawings and so on that offer insights into Perec's working methods. When combined with Bellos's translation of 53 Days, the novel Perec had half finished at the time of his death and to which his friends Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud added his notes, we gain access to the way this fascinating writer proceeded. The photographs are terrific too. And that Underwood typewriter!
Bellos is a superb writer. His translations of Perec are testament to that. I was never bored once in all 800 pages of this exhaustive biography. Bellos really brings Perec alive in A Life in Words. At the end, one feels one is mourning a personal friend. Subsequently, I have returned to it, time and again, especially when reading Perec's own work. Bellos proves an erudite and indefatigable guide. For anyone interested in Perec's writing, I can't recommend this biography highly enough. Among other platitudes, it might be described as indispensable. In this case, that happens to be true.
Although he's long been based in NJ, I believe Bellos was brought up in Southend-on-Sea. Well, aren't all the leading intellectuals?
August 1, 2020
Exactly what a good biography should be. I learnt not just about Perec the man but a great deal about his work.
Now I need to read more Perec
Now I need to read more Perec
March 31, 2013
It's a while since I read this, but I still regard it as one of the best biographies I have read. It is as good as Ellmann's biography of Joyce but, for me, it left me with a feeling that, not only did I know a lot more about this great, humane and hugely inventive writer, but that I would love to have known him. I felt terrible, and genuine, sadness at his death. Such an amazing man, so complex and so amusing. For anyone who likes Life: A User's Manual, or any of Perec's other books, this is an essential read which illuminates many aspects of his writing, most especially the way the heartbreaking details of his early years impacted on the very structure of his writing.
February 8, 2018
A falta de leerme el número 7 de los Cahiers Georges Perec, donde familiares y amigos del escritor opinan sobre este trabajo de David Bellos y hacen algunas correcciones... puedo decir que esta biografía me ha gustado mucho. Creo que David Bellos era la persona más adecuada para escribirla, no solo por ser el traductor al inglés de los libros más importantes de Perec, sino porque se nota desde la primera página lo mucho que aprecia la obra perecquiana, lo bien que la entiende y lo en sintonía que está con los propósitos del escritor francés y su sentido del humor.
Bellos dedica una parte importante del libro a desentrañar las claves de las obras principales de Perec, que esconden muchas referencias a su vida, muchos códigos y reglas para ensamblar sus páginas (Perec se sentía más cómodo escribiendo bajo alguna restricción formal), y lo hace de una manera accesible y agradable para el lector. Ahora pienso que cuando lea o relea esas obras (La vida instrucciones de uso cae cada tres años o así), voy a disfrutarlas y entenderlas el doble.
P. S.: Por qué Perec tuvo que morirse tan joven, cago en to.
Bellos dedica una parte importante del libro a desentrañar las claves de las obras principales de Perec, que esconden muchas referencias a su vida, muchos códigos y reglas para ensamblar sus páginas (Perec se sentía más cómodo escribiendo bajo alguna restricción formal), y lo hace de una manera accesible y agradable para el lector. Ahora pienso que cuando lea o relea esas obras (La vida instrucciones de uso cae cada tres años o así), voy a disfrutarlas y entenderlas el doble.
P. S.: Por qué Perec tuvo que morirse tan joven, cago en to.
April 24, 2016
Deserves to sit along the best of Richard Ellmann and Brian Boyd. Magisterial erudition captures Perec"s wonky world. Early in the biography the reader is informed of the myriad puns associated with Perec's name. Perec in Serbo-Croat means pretzel. The sinuous always appeared second nature to Georgie Pretzel, for sure but throbbing sorrow adumbrates its own moribund rhythm across his life. This marks the end of this trip and the time spent with this book was so appropriate. Perec loved Belgrade, as do I. History's dark curtains often demarcate the players and the acts. It is a shame that Perec didn't have time to raise a few more.
January 28, 2023
An excellent biography of a truly fascinating author and person
June 26, 2017
A must read for anyone with an interest in the work of Perec. I came to love the human being responsible for Life a User’s Manual. His vulnerability and sweetness along with the genius completely bowled me over. He was orphaned as a young child of Jewish Polish immigrants to France and raised by an aunt and uncle. He seems to have been well cared for but the losses he experienced as a small boy are heartbreaking to contemplate. His education was somewhat sporadic and he did not continue as far as his intellect warranted as far as formal higher learning but he developed important relationships that fed his thirst for knowledge. It was fascinating learning of his path to his obsessive interest in wordplay and all types of language manipulation and jokes. He was a remarkable and inventive spirit and his early loss was nothing short of tragic. Monumental achievement and has inspired me to revisit LAUM very soon!
January 14, 2014
This is David Bellos's biography of the madcap 20th-century French writer best known for his massive novel La Vie Mode d’Emploi and the constrained writing masterpiece (the letter "e" is never used in hundreds of pages) La Disparition. Published in 1993, this was the first biography of Perec in any language and its import can be seen its warm reception in Perec's native France as in the English-speaking world.
Bellos based the biography on archival research and on conversations with the writer's friends and family, many of whom were still very much alive when he wrote it as Perec had died at the untimely age of 46 only a decade before. The biography is divided into sixty-six short chapters, and at the end of each Bellos credits his written sources and the various individuals whose oral testimony he relied on for that particular passage.
While fans may know that, in spite of his Breton-sounding surname, Perec was born to Polish Jewish immigrants, Bellos elucidates his entire family tree, which spanned not only Poland and France, but many other countries around the world as well. His close relatives were major players in the international pearl trade and built roads across Israel, and his cousin Bianca Lamblin is known for her sexual relationship with Jean-Paul Satrtre Simone de Beauvoir as a schoolgirl (though Bellos wrote this before the revelations of Beauvoir's misdoings). Another example of the detail here is that Bellos describes in considerable detail the information-management tasks that Perec performed as his "day job" in a French neurological research laboratory, showing how he skill for categorization passed over into his fiction.
Bellos also gets into the specifics of Perec's work, spending many pages describing the hidden framework on which Perec built La Vie Mode d’Emploi, and offering plenty of other examples of Perec's constrained writing from poetry to short stories.
Though this will be a wealth of information on Perec's life and work, two decades later one can see a few deficiencies, as some new material has come to light. Also, Bellos ends his biograpy with Perec's untimely death from lung cancer in a Paris hospital, and we don't get any kind of "Aftermath" chapter describing his funeral or what happened to his estate.
It is worth noting that the original 1993 print run of Georges Perec: A Life in Words was incorrectly printed. If you purchase a copy, be sure that it was printed in 1995 (published as "Revised edition") or later.
Bellos based the biography on archival research and on conversations with the writer's friends and family, many of whom were still very much alive when he wrote it as Perec had died at the untimely age of 46 only a decade before. The biography is divided into sixty-six short chapters, and at the end of each Bellos credits his written sources and the various individuals whose oral testimony he relied on for that particular passage.
While fans may know that, in spite of his Breton-sounding surname, Perec was born to Polish Jewish immigrants, Bellos elucidates his entire family tree, which spanned not only Poland and France, but many other countries around the world as well. His close relatives were major players in the international pearl trade and built roads across Israel, and his cousin Bianca Lamblin is known for her sexual relationship with Jean-Paul Satrtre Simone de Beauvoir as a schoolgirl (though Bellos wrote this before the revelations of Beauvoir's misdoings). Another example of the detail here is that Bellos describes in considerable detail the information-management tasks that Perec performed as his "day job" in a French neurological research laboratory, showing how he skill for categorization passed over into his fiction.
Bellos also gets into the specifics of Perec's work, spending many pages describing the hidden framework on which Perec built La Vie Mode d’Emploi, and offering plenty of other examples of Perec's constrained writing from poetry to short stories.
Though this will be a wealth of information on Perec's life and work, two decades later one can see a few deficiencies, as some new material has come to light. Also, Bellos ends his biograpy with Perec's untimely death from lung cancer in a Paris hospital, and we don't get any kind of "Aftermath" chapter describing his funeral or what happened to his estate.
It is worth noting that the original 1993 print run of Georges Perec: A Life in Words was incorrectly printed. If you purchase a copy, be sure that it was printed in 1995 (published as "Revised edition") or later.
February 15, 2008
I believe page 203 in this book should rank
among the classics in literary biographies.
It is a discussion of Perec's shoes, and specifically
the detail of Perec's well-loved
Lobbs which can only be bought in a single boutique
on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Named after the Comte no doubt, in his
joyous wandering, must have good footwear..
Read
November 21, 2020Picked this up in a charity shop and spent the next few days devouring it - such a brilliantly detailed unpicking and putting back together of Perec and his work, now to return to re-read Life a Users Manual and W Memory of a Childhood and rewatch A Man Asleep.
September 2, 2024
I put off finishing this book for months because I didn't want Perec to die.
Very well-researched account of a man whose life and work are deeply fascinating and moving. This felt a bit messy and technical at times, but I guess it's bound to be when Perec's mind was seemingly moving in all directions at all times.
One of my favourite chapters was the one that dealt with his job at the lab, and all the shenanigans he got up to there.
I wish there were maybe more testimonies from people who had known him, and more anecdotes about how he was with his friends and family.
I'd be curious to read the other biography by Claude Burgelin and see what it brings to the table some 30 years after this one.
Very well-researched account of a man whose life and work are deeply fascinating and moving. This felt a bit messy and technical at times, but I guess it's bound to be when Perec's mind was seemingly moving in all directions at all times.
One of my favourite chapters was the one that dealt with his job at the lab, and all the shenanigans he got up to there.
I wish there were maybe more testimonies from people who had known him, and more anecdotes about how he was with his friends and family.
I'd be curious to read the other biography by Claude Burgelin and see what it brings to the table some 30 years after this one.
March 19, 2024
an obsessively detailed bio for an obsessive detail driven man of words. a bit of a leap for me to read a bio of somebody after only one work of theirs but life a user's manual is SUCH a work, in any case i'd been hearing about perec for a while thru various avenues of interests.
very much comes from the exact place you want a bio of an artist to come from and hits for that reason. not only loves perec the man but shows an insanely comprehensive grasp of the mechanics and genius behind perec's very intricate books. i want to read most of them now but will only be able to do so in french , a challenge i'm fine with.
very much comes from the exact place you want a bio of an artist to come from and hits for that reason. not only loves perec the man but shows an insanely comprehensive grasp of the mechanics and genius behind perec's very intricate books. i want to read most of them now but will only be able to do so in french , a challenge i'm fine with.
November 12, 2025
Excelente biografía. Escrita con mucho tacto y con una actitud filológica por parte de Bellos. Aprecié bastante los apéndices (tanto finales como entre capítulos) que contiene este libro, donde David Bellos proporciona información muy útil sobre las obras de Perec. Una decisión inteligente, desde luego, ya que el libro se convierte así en un texto a tener muy en cuenta para futuras lecturas o estudios. Como en la biografía de Nadler sobre Spinoza, el libro de Dellos termina bruscamente con la muerte del escritor. Mejor así. Escribir sobre la influencia de Perec equivaldría a escribir otro volumen, otro libro, quizás.
April 27, 2019
A wonderful life of a wonderful writer.
July 30, 2023
Chapeau, Mr. Bellos!!
Chapeau, Monsieur Perec!
Großartige Biographie mit wunderbar ausgegrabenen Details.
Persona Perec und sein Werk ist facettenreich dargestellt. Ich verstehe meine Faszination für Autor und Werk nach dieser Lektüre umso mehr, konnte Querbezüge zu anderen Autoren entdeckten, die ich ebenfalls sehr schätze (Calvino und Barthes) und Zeitgeschehen einordnen, habe die Perec'schen Hörspiele für mich entdeckt und abschließend ist in mir die Lust entfacht noch einmal "Das Leben Gebrauchsanweisung" zu lesen.
Absolute Leseempfehlung.
Chapeau, Monsieur Perec!
Großartige Biographie mit wunderbar ausgegrabenen Details.
Persona Perec und sein Werk ist facettenreich dargestellt. Ich verstehe meine Faszination für Autor und Werk nach dieser Lektüre umso mehr, konnte Querbezüge zu anderen Autoren entdeckten, die ich ebenfalls sehr schätze (Calvino und Barthes) und Zeitgeschehen einordnen, habe die Perec'schen Hörspiele für mich entdeckt und abschließend ist in mir die Lust entfacht noch einmal "Das Leben Gebrauchsanweisung" zu lesen.
Absolute Leseempfehlung.
September 9, 2008
Again, "current" is entirely relative. I started reading this in about 1994, I think? So it's been on pause for a very long time. Mostly because it was so hard to carry around and other things took over. Now it and its bookmark are sitting in a box in a storage space in Sydney. And of course now I want to get back to reading it. Heigh ho. One day.
December 24, 2008
"An overwhelmingly human portrait, as vivid as it is complex, not only of Perec but of...Paris intellectual life in the 60s and 70s."
— Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
— Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
September 18, 2009
Perec applied for a library position held by Robbe-Grillet? Fascinating! (He was not hired for said job, btw.)
March 10, 2013
Dave Bellos : Georges Perec :: Brian Boyd : Vladimir Nabokov
More details to follow. (hopefully)
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews