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Entretiens, conférences, textes rares, inédits
Les entretiens et conférences de Georges Perec, ainsi que les notes de lecture, essais, billets d’humeur, préfaces, articles, lettres et inédits réunis ici, témoignent de l’émergence, de l’évolution et de l’affirmation progressives d’une esthétique qui fera de lui une des figures incontournables de la littérature mondiale. L’appareil critique qui accompagne ces documents en explicite le contexte littéraire, culturel et sociopolitique.
La première partie permet, au fil des déclarations de l’écrivain, de suivre son cheminement depuis son irruption sur la scène littéraire avec Les Choses (prix Renaudot 1965) jusqu’à sa disparition en mars 1982 à l’âge de quarante-six ans, alors qu’il a atteint, grâce au succès de La Vie mode d’emploi (prix Médicis 1978), ce moment privilégié dans la vie d’un écrivain où il peut enfin « vivre de sa plume ».
Dans la seconde partie, sont rassemblés des écrits non repris dans les recueils posthumes ou restés inédits, auxquels il est fait allusion dans les entretiens et conférences et dont les plus anciens ont gagné en pertinence avec la publication récente des romans de jeunesse, L’Attentat de Sarajevo et Le Condottière. Dans ce corpus foisonnant, deux textes font hapax. L’un est un long article de Georges Perec sur la guerre d’Algérie, paru dans la revue yougoslave Pregled en 1957, bilan détaillé du conflit et de l’analyse politique « à chaud » qu’en propose le jeune homme de vingt ans. L’autre est un texte inclassable, daté de 1975, qui est l’occasion de documenter un séjour à New York riche en rencontres avec l’avant-garde new-yorkaise.
M.R.
La première partie permet, au fil des déclarations de l’écrivain, de suivre son cheminement depuis son irruption sur la scène littéraire avec Les Choses (prix Renaudot 1965) jusqu’à sa disparition en mars 1982 à l’âge de quarante-six ans, alors qu’il a atteint, grâce au succès de La Vie mode d’emploi (prix Médicis 1978), ce moment privilégié dans la vie d’un écrivain où il peut enfin « vivre de sa plume ».
Dans la seconde partie, sont rassemblés des écrits non repris dans les recueils posthumes ou restés inédits, auxquels il est fait allusion dans les entretiens et conférences et dont les plus anciens ont gagné en pertinence avec la publication récente des romans de jeunesse, L’Attentat de Sarajevo et Le Condottière. Dans ce corpus foisonnant, deux textes font hapax. L’un est un long article de Georges Perec sur la guerre d’Algérie, paru dans la revue yougoslave Pregled en 1957, bilan détaillé du conflit et de l’analyse politique « à chaud » qu’en propose le jeune homme de vingt ans. L’autre est un texte inclassable, daté de 1975, qui est l’occasion de documenter un séjour à New York riche en rencontres avec l’avant-garde new-yorkaise.
M.R.
1104 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
2 people are currently reading
7 people want to read
About the author
Georges Perec
164 books1,637 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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