An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

by Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal (Translator)

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

Genres: Nonfiction, France, Essays, French Literature, Poetry, Classics, Literature

55 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

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.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

When my daughter was born last year we were living in Paris's sixth arrondissement, and every weekend, while my wife was at work presenting the news, I would walk up the rue du Cherche-Midi with the pushchair, cut right down rue du Vieux Colombier, and then circle round and round the Place Saint-Sulpice for hours on end waiting for Clementine to go to sleep.

The church there is my favourite in Paris, as beautiful as Notre-Dame but much quieter, and with an amazing organ whose organist used to practise sometimes on quiet Sunday afternoons. This was where Talleyrand was christened, and the Marquis de Sade, to name but two. Outside in the square is a well-known fountain and a few trees that provide some slowly-revolving blocks of shade during the day.

I must have seen that square in every weather and from every angle – I've sat on every stone bench and I've had a coffee at every table in the one remaining café. I've watched a priest trip on the church steps and go flying into a cyclist, and I've been laughed at by unsympathetic tourists when my daughter projectile vomited all over herself, all over me, and all over the paperback I was reading at the time (Nightwood, which not incidentally is largely set in an apartment above the café on this very square).

I feel, therefore, uniquely qualified to review this little extrait de carnet from Georges Perec, who set himself the task of simply observing everything that he could see in the Place Saint-Sulpice as he sat there with a notebook over a weekend in October 1974.

It's the sort of exercise you might do quite regularly as a writer, but it's not the sort of thing you'd normally publish raw. And I did go back and forth with this short book: at first I found it just as banal as it sounds; then I started to find it all rather invigorating; and then unfortunately by the end I started to find it all a bit pointless again.

This is a book whose value resides almost entirely in your own head, and not in the words on the page – which of course is true for all books, but sometimes it takes a minimalist text like this to remind you of the fact.

Perec's descriptions are extremely bare, almost catalogic. He is weirdly obsessed with the buses:

A 96 goes past. An 87 goes past. An 86 goes past. A 70 goes past. A ‘Grenelle Interlinge’ truck goes past.
Calm. No one at the bus stop.
A 63 goes past. A 96 goes past.

If you are waiting for him to start reflecting on what he sees, to speculate in some way or to draw inferences about the scene – basically, to make things up – you will be waiting a long time. There is not much of that; which I found strange, because after twenty minutes sitting there rocking a pushchair with my foot, I had already given all the pigeons names and invented a lubricious back-story for the brunette waiting outside the town hall. If I had written this book it would doubtless be filled with a lot of that kind of thing, but Perec either has a less wandering mind than I do or (more likely) he is keeping himself deliberately restrained, factual, camera-like. By the end of the book we are still being fed such apparent banalities as:

The traffic lights turn red (this happens to them often)

I was interested to see how much of the scene I recognised, and certainly a lot has not changed: the descriptions of women coming out of mass holding pyramidal packets from the local patisserie, or of men outside the tabac tearing the cellophane off cigarette packs, could have been written yesterday.

He kept talking about deux-chevaux going past, and I was idly wondering was this meant until suddenly as I read it for the fifth time I realised he was talking about those old Citroën 2CVs. Man, those things used to be everywhere, didn't they!? That suddenly made it all feel a lot more seventies. And then this got me wondering about dog-shit, which Perec does not mention; but I'm sure dog-shit used to be everywhere in Paris – right? I mean I wasn't around in 1974, but I'm sure I remember from holidays in the 80s that there was A LOT of it. Perec apparently doesn't see any. J'accuse, Georges!

Anyway, you can see some of the value this might have for future generations. God knows it would be great to read a document like this written in, let's say, 1874, or 1574 for that matter.

Beyond that, your reaction to Tentative d'épuisement will depend on many factors. I no longer get excited about experimentation for its own sake, nor do I think this is a very innovative project in the first place. Nevertheless parts of it, with their dedication to developing awareness and observation, won me round, and the final few lines started to read like free verse; I was unexpectedly moved.

Oh. And on the last page, I suddenly read this:

Passe un jeune papa portant son bébé endormi sur son dos (et un parapluie à la main)

and oh god I know it's stupid, but I suddenly couldn't help imagining that Georges, sitting there at his café in 1974, squinting out through the rain, was watching me trudge into his field of vision from 2012, hugging my baby with one hand, and with one of his books, or something very like it, jammed in the back pocket of my jeans.

[December 2013]

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is five after two
An 87 passes by
People, in waves, continually
A priest returning from a trip
A child slides a toy car along the windowpane of the Café
A man stops to say hello to the big dog of Café,
peacefully stretched out in front of the door
An 86 passes by
A 63 passes by
I wish I could have walked by, and tapped on the window
Afternoon Georges, fine day it is
A young man walks by: he is carrying a large portfolio
Malissard Dubernay rapid transit passes by
A 70 passes by
A 96
It is two twenty...

Two years before he started his magnum opus 'Life: A users Manual', Perec penned this short technical exercise in observation In Paris, 1974. It's quite simple really. Watch the world go by, and write it down. It is writing of a stripped back nature, with the bare minimum of fact. Yet, somehow a work of literature is still created, albeit, a brief one. One thing is for certain, Perec fans may appreciate this, but most others will look at it as repetitive and pointless. I side with Perec. As he spends his time exhaustively documenting everything he sees and hears from a series of cafe windows, it starts to take on an air of poignancy, and I suddenly became totally relaxed, life slowed down. How often do I get to say that in this rush rush world.

There are obvious nods towards early thoughts for 'Life A users Manual', an outside glimpse, before he moved his attention to every nook and cranny of an imaginary Parisian apartment. Time, unarrestable works against his project here somewhat, and he is diverted from his observations by an effort to observe what has specifically changed in his field of view from one day to the next. Seemingly nothing, but, what will in fact, eventually become everything.
It is almost what it doesn't say, that this short text, this noble exercise in futility, conveys such a sense of melancholy. If in this one world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the incommunicable.

The next time I sit in a Café watching the world go by, My mind will immediately think of Perec watching the world go by.

[Eliana Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

(No iba a escribir nada. Pero ante una consulta que me hicieron, aquí va mi ridículo y fallido intento misceláneo de encontrar un comentario inabarcable ante dichas inquietudes....)

Un libro diferente, inclasificable, curioso, sobre lo no-contado, que pone de relieve lo que no suele ser protagonista... Un ejercicio textual experimental que el autor aborda durante tres días seguidos al intentar realizar el registro minucioso de la observación de lo "infraordinario" en una plaza de París, cuya lectura puede cobrar mayor o menor valor, interés, tamaño y relevancia según la mirada, la mente y los sentimientos de cada lector...Un lugar y momentos únicos, que en infinitos otros puede transformarse... Una serie de situaciones, seres y objetos, que habiendo sido tal vez casi imperceptibles a la mayoría de las miradas, consiguieron perpetuidad en una especie de entramado descriptivo documental verbal...Un entretejido de piezas que enlazan una suerte de ensayo poético sobre la percepción del cotidiano devenir transcurrir urbano temporal....

Tentativa de agotar un lugar parisino (1975), del particular escritor francés Georges Perec (1936-1982), es un libro muy breve, que se encuentra dividido en tres partes. Cada una de las cuales consta de pequeños capítulos numerados que suman un total de nueve (4, 3 y 2). Previamente, incluye un par de párrafos como introducción al plan perecquiano. Los cuales se transcriben a continuación:

"Hay muchas cosas en la plaza Saint-Sulpice, por ejemplo: un ayuntamiento, un edificio de un organismo impositivo, una comisaría, tres cafés —uno de los cuales tiene kiosko—, un cine, una iglesia en la que trabajaron Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenord, Servandoni y Chalgrin, dedicada a un capellán de Clotaire II que fue obispo de Bourges desde 624 a 644, y cuya fiesta se celebra el 17 de enero, un editor, una empresa de pompas fúnebres, una agencia de viajes, una parada de autobuses, un sastre, un hotel, una fuente decorada con las estatuas de los cuatro grandes oradores cristianos (Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier y Massillon), un kiosko de diarios, una santería, un estacionamiento, un instituto de belleza y muchas otras cosas más.
Un gran número de esas cosas, si no la mayoría, fue descripto, inventariado, fotografiado, contado o enumerado. Mi objetivo en las páginas que siguen ha sido más bien describir el resto: lo que generalmente no se anota, lo que no se nota, lo que no tiene importancia: lo que pasa cuando no pasa nada, salvo tiempo, gente, autos y nubes."

Cada una de dichas divisiones corresponde a uno de los días de la experiencia directa (viernes 18, sábado 19 y domingo 20 de octubre de 1974). Y cada uno de los breves capítulos se inicia con la fecha, el horario, la ubicación del observador (en cafés o en bancos) y algún dato climático. Luego, se prosigue al registro, a la anotación, a la enumeración y a la fijación textual de lo que ve (que comúnmente la mayoría no se detiene a fijarse, menos aún a transcribir).

El proyecto, el observante, lo observado. Parece y suena simple. Un escritor se sienta, observa, toma nota. Mas ¿cómo será el desarrollo en su ejecución? A enfrentarlo se propone Perec, a vivirlo se entrega el lector...Tal vez, hasta invitado a reflexionar sobre diversas cuestiones y a descubrir la poesía rítmica y pictórica que nos contiene y nos rodea...Y así, percibir y descifrar los detalles y la complejidad escondida a primera vista.

Ahora bien, puede decirse que esta obra no sea para todo el mundo, más allá de los gustos, o que eso, en parte, dependa del momento o de la situación o de la intención o de la necesidad de lectura que tenga cada uno o hasta mismo que se pueda cambiar su sentir al respecto en un momento y en otro posterior, ya sea por tiempo transcurrido o relectura. Tal vez, esto suceda con todos los libros, aunque en algunos, como en este caso, lo sea más notorio. Habrá personas a las que esta propuesta pueda parecerles aburrida o poco atractiva o sin sentido, más aún si se desea leer algo más "ficcional", por decirlo de algún modo, o si se es algo estructurado en cuanto a los géneros y ciertas nociones artísticas. Mientras que a otros les sirva como documento más sociológico o histórico o antropológico, digamos, o por fanatismo con el autor de culto o como material motivador para escribir o hacer su experiencia artística. O puede ocurrir que les sea más familiar la cuestión tratada y no les sorprenda tanto. Pero, también, sería posible que para algunos haya un contacto más directo con su alma (del texto y/o propia)...Es que en lo que parece ser un recurso formal más vinculado a lo asociado a lo no-literario, científico (antropológico, etnográfico o sociológico), con la visión particular del autor y la complicidad de un lector abierto al juego, puede encontrarse la literariedad. Algo así como el discurso cotidiano de un sector de París de ese entonces, desde la óptica, la perspectiva y voz de este especial observador, cuya subjetividad se asoma, sostiene y acompaña. Entonces, quien lee, quizás, puede ver más allá y despertarse a imaginar o a reflexionar o motivarse a ser otro observador de sí mismo, de los otros y de otro entorno.

Una cuestión a tener en cuenta es el material con el que se construye este entretejido tapiz. Perec no se propone describir los detalles de la plaza o de su fuente o de la arquitectura de los edificios cercanos. Eso ya fue tenido en cuenta por otras disciplinas o ya ha sido fotografiado o retratado. Ni a centrarse en una sola persona o vehículo o animal. Sus fotografías léxicas o pinceladas de cuadros impresionistas verbales se refieren a lo que fluye entre esas cosas: los seres (humanos y animales), los objetos, los transportes y el tiempo (clima, horas). Notar lo que ocurre en esa pequeña realidad, capturar lo que pasa en ese espacio y tiempo, agotarlo, descubrir su vitalidad, su movilidad y quietud, su existencia. Captar los miles de detalles simultáneos que están, suceden y/o se suceden y hacerlos letras. Pero esto que puede ser (y que para muchos sólo así lo sea) un sencillo listado, inventario y archivo de esas cosas, para una mirada algo más abierta, curiosa o atenta quizás pueda reflejar y significar más. No sólo por los elementos, sino también por quién los nombra. Y no solamente por el contenido y el continente, sino también, si se quiere extender (y acercar), por ver allí algo del hombre contemporáneo urbano occidental y de cada uno.

¿Se puede agotar un espacio? ¿Puede un observador notar, abarcar y textualizar todo lo que ocurre? Ya el título algo nos adelanta. ¿Y qué dice eso de nuestra percepción? ¿Significa esto que en esa supuesta nada se encuentra mucho? ¿Se pude ser totalmente objetivo en esta tarea? ¿El lenguaje como herramienta puede transcribir totalmente el espacio y tiempo? La labor se aborda desde una realidad referida medianamente conocida, no se alista como algo nuevo o desconocido, sino como algo tan cercano, familiar y circundante, que se dejó de apreciar, sentir o descifrar. Aceptado sin preguntas, transcurrido sin importar, presente, sin tener presente. Y no toma un elemento o un hecho singular, sino como partes de un todo, cual un punto en un cuadro dinámico total. Porque todo y todos podemos pertenecer a una lista, aunque detrás haya una individualidad y especificidad única, pero eso es otro tema...Entonces, aquí no hay un cronista de nuevos mundos o de mundos antiguos o lejanos o una apreciación de turista, ni se dirige a un lector que desconozca mucho los objetos que percibe, por lo tanto, las menciones son directas y con lenguaje simple y claro como lo que pasa. Y sí, de hecho la palabra "pasa" aparece mucho, entre gente que va y viene y recorridos de medios de transporte, mientras claramente no se detiene el tiempo, aunque se lo sienta y se lo intente tomar con ritmos, reiteraciones, sucesiones o menciones explícitas, el mismo se escurre también entre esas trayectorias del vital lugar. Y así mismo, también el mismo espacio inabarcable a la vista humana se escapa, quedando sólo unos fragmentos hechos palabras.

Como en Historia hay quien busca dar voz y visibilidad a personajes olvidados, esta tentativa es cuasi una oda a lo real cotidiano, a los autobuses que sin chocar nos transportan sin ser noticia, a las actividades urbanas que hacen a la vida de muchos, a ese tiempo que pasa y existe aunque no haya grandes sucesos, tragedias memorables o héroes inolvidables a simple vista en escena, a lo que es en sí el material base de la vida real, de los sueños, de las artes y de la literatura. Interrogar lo cotidiano, lo que nos construye y construimos diariamente. Ser consciente de lo automatizado y lo normalizado. Ver lo mágico y lo extraordinario que está a nuestro alcance en lo ordinario infraordinario. Lo que nos contiene, nos habita, nos pasa y pasa cuando esperamos lo grande, lo que olvidamos mientras lo hacemos o lo subestimamos al jerarquizar importancias, lo diario que no aparece en los diarios de la prensa. En ese juego de ser nadie y alguien, entre yo y otros. En ese no-lugar al que quiere darle lugar. Y en esa finitud humana ante inmensidad, el lector acompaña a un hombre que pretende atender lo desatendido, hacerse de lo inabarcable a las herramientas humanas, ordenar, clasificar, dar una lógica a lo registrado y perderse-reencontrarse en su entorno, en los otros y en su labor de escritura.

Bajo esa premisa por sus páginas aparecen distintos tipos de vehículos usados para diferentes fines (autobuses varios, camiones, mudanza, correo, autos particulares, auto-escuela, ómnibus de turistas....), personas (niños, adultos, ancianos), realizando distintas actividades, relacionándose entre sí o con los edificios o con objetos varios o con las calles o con los medios y animales (principalmente palomas, muchas palomas). Todos compartiendo ese espacio en ese tiempo. Pero bajo esta aparente neutralidad objetiva, hay alguien más presente que es fundamental, nuestro mediador, que aunque a veces se hace más evidente, manifestando algunas ideas o sensaciones entre paréntesis, no olvidemos que como lectores podemos sentirlo siempre por detrás porque es nuestro guía visual testigo. Su experiencia de vida, sus intereses, sus gustos, su profesión, sus sentidos, sus estudios, su humor y demás, toda su subjetividad, matiza, organiza, guiona y define esta apreciación única que nos entrega por la sencilla razón de que el texto de otro observador sería de otro manera, con sus propias huellas de enunciación y de percepción. Por lo tanto, lo que le atrae, lo que menos nota, lo que se le escapa, sus limitaciones, su sentir físico durante el ejercicio y su ubicación espacial ya un poco seleccionan lo enunciado. Y cómo lo presenta, las palabras usadas (más aún en alguna que inventa), las ideas, las asociaciones y las apreciaciones tienen que ver con su universo personal, cultural, social e histórico.

"Mirando sólo un detalle, por ejemplo la rue Férou, y durante el tiempo suficiente (uno o dos minutos), se puede, sin ninguna dificultad, imaginar que se está en Etampes o en Bourges, o incluso en algún lugar en Viena (Austria) donde por otra parte nunca estuve."

Georges Perec fue un artista entregado a intentar escribir libros particulares y diferentes entre sí, sin repetir la fórmula o sistema o modo de elaboración de cada uno (aunque con temas y elementos que hacen a la esencia de su estilo, universo y camino hacia lo que creía El Libro). Como un desafío se lanzaba a la búsqueda de la creatividad, a la experimentación, a partir de una premisa que supuestamente limitándolo, le liberaba, y a plasmar sus ideas sobre la vida, sobre el arte y sobre la literatura en el "cultivo" de sus "artefactos" librescos. Centrándose, principalmente y resumiendo, en cuatro campos de interés: uno sociológico (la vida cotidiana y lo supuestamente sin importancia, vinculado a la sociedad contemporánea), uno autobiográfico (su rica historia y personalidad, vinculado al tema de la memoria y la identidad), uno lúdico (miembro del grupo OuLiPo, gusto por los juegos de lenguaje, vinculado a su idea de arte y de literatura como arte combinatoria) y uno novelesco (las historias y peripecias, vinculado al realismo ficcional). Un escritor que no buscó ser popular ni comercial y mantuvo un trabajo paralelo la mayor parte de su vida, pero que llegó a ser autor de culto. Una personalidad singular, que despertó la atención, la valoración, el reconocimiento, el cariño, el elogio y la admiración de muchos escritores como Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vilas-Matas (que hasta hizo lo propio con otra plaza) y Paul Auster, pero también despertó la atención en otros ámbitos artísticos.

Como en toda su producción que he leído, Perec parece tener un compromiso, una dedicación, una entrega y un cariño hacia su propuesta y su trabajo, que le imprimen una riqueza y honestidad formal que puede ser reconocida más allá del gusto de cada uno. Y también posee respeto y consideración hacia su lector, brindándole el espacio y la distancia apropiada para que tenga su propia experiencia al dialogar con el texto como último eslabón de la cadena de producción creativa, que lo habilita a diferentes niveles de lectura sin subestimarlo, dándole coprotagonismo en ese juego entre escritor y lector. Por lo tanto, más que el argumento, importa el cómo, el estilo, y los efectos que pueda causar, significar e iluminar durante la vivencia de lectura en cada individualidad. Por eso, aunque tengamos cierto conocimiento o intuición de los elementos o temas que puedan aparecer en este texto, la cuestión está en cómo se entrecruzan y significan en ese entramado que compone, construye y nos interpela.

Si bien no es indispensable haberlo leído previamente, quien haya tenido la oportunidad podrá encontrarse con sus cuestiones, intereses, obsesiones, amores.Y aunque no sea indispensable conocer un poco de su vida, el hacerlo puede que signifique o dé una compresión especial a esos detalles que le atraían y ocupaban. De algún modo, en mayor o menor medida, todos los fragmentos que componen su ser alimentan su escritura y quizás pueden llegar percibirse. El archivero-bibliotecario-secretario (que inventó hasta un sistema), el diseñador de crucigramas, el amiguero con su humor espontáneo. Su deseo de ser pintor, su paso por el paracaidismo en el servicio militar, su intento de estudiar sociología e historia, sus relaciones con artistas e intelectuales, su vínculo el cine, con la radio y con las revistas. Su interés por los juegos del lenguaje, por lo lúdico, por las piezas, los fragmentos y la arquitectura textual. Su concepción de la escritura para fijar lo efímero, su respeto a lo minúsculo. Su interrelación con lo urbano, con la ciudad, con la arquitectura, la matemática, los diagramas. Su paso por el fracaso y el éxito, su depresión, su alegría, su renovación de géneros y temáticas, sus proyectos, su deseo de abarcar...Sus valoraciones de los objetos, de los espacios, de los microacontecimientos....sus listas. Y su trabajo con la identidad y la memoria...Su presencia-ausencia-algoeterna infancia, su orfandad, su necesidad vital de olvidar su cultura y su origen para sobrevivir en esa época, su falta de recuerdos, su paso por el psicoanálisis, su esfuerzo por recobrarlos, por reconstruirse, por crear su autobiografía y su memoria sin ser centro y vinculándose con un otro, con lo otro, con la memoria colectiva y ficcional.

(Dentro de lo que he leído de su producción, este texto, que originariamente publicó en una revista, se vincula a los que se agrupan en "Lo infraordinario", "Pensar/Clasificar", "Especies de espacios" (que aún no leí completo). Y por sus características del tratamiento de la observación, la clasificación e interés en el espacio, pueden ser materiales para otras disciplinas como arquitectura. Es decir, es posible que alguien llegue a él por ambientes no literarios y asociarlo a conceptos, corrientes y autores varios. Pero también puede ignorarse ese nivel de lectura y sólo dejarse llevar por el ejercicio de leerlo.)

Por otro lado, no hace falta haber conocido ese escenario protagonista o mirar imágenes del mismo antes o al leerlo. Aunque pueda que sea un modo interesante de acercarse y abordarlo, al menos no fue mi caso. Tal vez la manera en lo que lo hice no sea el ideal para algunos, pero era como podía y me sirvió (en este caso concreto más). Lo leí, ya hace unos meses, entre espera y viaje de colectivo (también escribo ahora así), con atención, pero cada tanto teniendo que pausar y relacionarme con ese contexto callejero. Y como leer no es sólo leer, en ese ida y vuelta entre texto y vida, entre antes y ahora y entre París y Buenos Aires, también se estableció una especie de comunicación. Aunque ¿qué significa ese lugar para los transeúntes y la vida? ¿importa específicamente dónde es? ¿Y en cuanto al tiempo pasado y presente? Pero, más allá de todo esto, me entregué a su invitación, a su compañía, a ver, pensar, sentir lo que con su forma de tratar el lenguaje me transmitía, sobrepasando su estética y musicalidad, a intentar apropiarlo y abarcarlo.

Perec suele ser elogiado por su originalidad, por su trabajo lúdico-serio con las palabras. Capaz de escribir una novela sin usar la vocal más frecuente de su idioma o sólo utilizando esa o de armarla con citas de otros autores o de describir un organigrama en palabras o de elaborar un edificio... Pero más allá de su talento para cumplir con sus premisas, se halla quizás algo que está de fondo como una llama que alimenta y anima todo ese trabajo formal al que da vida, esencia y particularidad. Lo existencial, lo humano, la vitalidad, lo sensible no evidente y la ternura que tanto sentía que le faltaba por las ausencias de su primera infancia, pero que paradójicamente muchos le vemos, nos despierta y tal vez conmueve.

No soy especialista en el autor (ni debería aclararlo, jaja) y aún me falta bastante por leer, así que podría equivocarme, pero
leer a Perec, entre otras muchas cosas, es un poco tanto la tentativa de abarcar a los otros, a uno mismo, a los objetos, al tiempo y los espacios como la consciencia de que no es posible ni en el arte, ni en la vida (por suerte para la creatividad y singularidad humana).

-------pd. Anexo aquí abajo----

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Update 8/1/2012: I have revised this Goodreads book review into a proper essay, now published on the Eyeshot website (thanks to Lee for taking an interest! And thanks to all of you for for your likes and comments). I am leaving my original Goodreads review below, as a document of the first draft of this essay, flaws and all.

An Attempt At Exhausting A Book On Goodreads

Date: June 30, 2012
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Location: Kavarna (Cafe), Decatur GA
Weather: Sunny, Record Breaking Heat

A small book.

The pages are stiff.

Translator's acknowledgment is short, about an inch down the page, and relatively forgettable.

Some kind of introduction in a bold sans serif font, 2.5 inches down the right side. The left side of the page is blank.

Page 5, first solid page of text.

Date, Time, Location and Weather are given at top.

Many bullet points.

Bus observations.

Page 6, observations go on.

A title: "Trajectories" in bold.

Sentences follow predictable form describing the destination of bus routes: "The (#) goes to (place)".

Short blocks of indented text, perhaps more personal observations?

Bus observations repeat.

I lose concentration slightly and have to re-read a sentence twice.

Another title: "Colors" in bold.

Page 9: last word is "Pause." about halfway down the page.

Page 10: part 2 is indicated with another set of Date, Time, Location. No weather this time. Does this mean it hasn't changed?

Sentences starting without a capital letter, erratic indents, what do they mean?

Page 11: back to normal format. Capitals at beginning of sentences.

Bus observations repeat.

An Attempt At Being Serious...

OK I was going to write a review of the entire book like that, but I don't think I have the stick-with-it-ness that Perec does. And it wouldn't be worth it just for a joke review, although I am not entirely joking... I did want to see how it would feel to inventory the normally un-noticed. Answer: it is exhausting and I started getting a heavy feeling in my stomach at the thought of finishing this exercise.

In case you haven't figured out by now, this short book is an experiment by Georges Perec to, as the title suggests, exhaust a place. That place is the Place Saint Sulpice, a busy corner in Paris both for car traffic, people traffic, animals, and inanimate objects (churches, cafes, candy wrappers). Perec says "My intention in the pages that follow was to describe ... that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds."

This was much more interesting than I had expected it to be from that description. Of course it was boring! Descriptions of people walking around looking not extraordinary in any way, buses passing by, pigeons landing, buses passing by again, he notices these things without attempting to select or curate them based on their interesting-ness, but just based on them happening. But 'curate' is exactly what he does, because he could easily have noticed and written about a completely different set of non-occurences: a bug flying by, or the color of the floor in the cafe he was sitting in, or the speed of the blue Mercedes truck instead of its color. Because the world has so much information in it, it is simply not possible to not select when writing, and this alone is interesting to me.

But it was interesting on a different level as well: what I started to notice through the boredom was that the smallest alteration of his syntax or the smallest change in what he noticed became a much bigger deal than if the book were full of interesting variety and non-boring content. So the reader is observing Perec's tiniest changes while Perec is observing the street for the tiniest changes (thus my review up top was not totally in jest). I started noticing things like:

- he would repeat things like the bus passing by, always with a complete identical sentence like "A 70 passes by" but by the end he shortens this to just "A 70"

- interesting word choices pop out more, like when some cars "dive" into the parking lot. Or when two tourist buses pass by "with their cargoes of photophagous Japanese" (guess what my new favorite word is)

- he visits the same place over 3 days, and is very concerned with the differences between the three days. What has changed since yesterday?

- this different-times/same-place obsession reminded me of Jenny Erpenbeck's book Visitation, which has a similar obsession, and starts with this epigraph: "As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other." -- Marie in Woyzeck by Georg Buchner

- he starts out being completely objective, sticking to the facts, but soon he starts tossing subjective things in like "A lady who has just bought an ugly candleholder goes by"

- I loved that I could see his thought processes come through every once in a while, like when he muses on the difference between busses passing by and everything else passing by. Several other times he analyzes why he has chosen a particular detail to write about rather than another detail. You get a sense that he is figuring out how he wants to conduct his experiment even as he is conducting his experiment.

Perec's saving grace here is probably that he didn't have too strict of a methodology. He had an idea, but he allowed himself to stray from it occasionally if he wanted to. This provided points of relief, humor, light, and variety (though you should not read this if you're mainly looking for variety) to keep a reader going despite the monotony of the endeavor as a whole.

Lastly: I enjoyed this book thoroughly, but I would never recommend it to anyone without a signed affidavit saying they won't blame me later.

An Attempt at Re-Exhausting a Place

Here's an idea: there is no reason I can't continue Perec's grand experiment by revisiting the very corner where he made his observations! Perec was interested in the passage of time. Well, it's been 38 years plus or minus some months now, and I will go to Saint-Sulpice myself, to see if anything has changed. Have the people become more ordinary, have the pigeons flown off for good? What, if anything, is the weather doing? And I will do all this not by sitting in that spot over three days, but by examining that spot in one specific moment, an instantaneous flash captured on top of a little car with the word "Google" written on the side. Surely Perec would have noticed such an out of the ordinary car, with a camera on top of it? But maybe he's fallen asleep. Or maybe it's too out of the ordinary, and he only notices 'infra-ordinary', boring things. So let's take a look, shall we?

http://goo.gl/maps/tYMk

It seems like Café de la Mairie is still in the same spot. And what is this? A bus, you say? "The 87 goes to Champ-de-Mars" Perec says on page 8. "The 87 goes to Champ-de-Mars" Perec says again, just to be sure, on page 9. Now I can repeat it: "The 87 goes to Champ-de-Mars" on page 2012!

And the people! Yes, there must be at least 50 people within view if I do a quick 360. Mopeds and bicycles everywhere. I don't remember Perec mentioning bicycles, but he did say he saw a few mopeds. One of them is going down the road right now in a business suit. Taxis lined up across the street from the cafe. "Agence de V---" my view is blocked. I'm clicking the arrows now, going up and down the street. A woman with red hair is standing in the bus, carrying several green plastic bags. A younger, perhaps asian woman (photophagous Japanese?) sits at the very back of the bus, her left hand on her chin. Oh, I can see the sign now in this view, it says "Agence de Voyages", possibly a travel agency. Among the list of things Perec mentions in the beginning is a travel agency. I have a hard time believing that a travel agency has survived so long.

A woman in a light brown trenchcoat is crossing the street. There are about 50 empty yellow foldout chairs in front of the Cafe de la Mairie, all facing outward. No, not all of them are empty. Will there be a concert across the street? Maybe this is just a form of compact outdoor seating, for maximum capacity/profit. Next to the cafe, two white trucks are at loggerheads.

'Sortie de Camions' My French is awful, I would be so lost in this country. I wonder what Perec would think about Google Streetview. He'd probably write 500 books based on it. A sign says 'Antiquaires.' Underneath it sit two men and a woman on a bench. A narrow alley is blocked off from construction, one side of an old building seems to be worked on. It looks like a government building, a courthouse maybe, but what is it doing with this tall section? http://goo.gl/maps/uuYY I don't remember Perec mentioning this.

The letter 'P' is still here. Perec noticed this too, maybe because his last name starts with a P. More mopeds, everyone is wearing helmets: good. The side of a blue truck advertises 'Bieres de Paris'. Next to the 'P' and the parked taxis is what appears to be a subway station. Was the subway here when Perec wrote in 1974? More trenchcoats, do the French love trenchcoats or what? Perec noticed several in his book.

Two men in light brown jackets walking down the street briskly (I can only assume, from their postures) one is carrying a plastic bag, can't make out the contents. Are they trying to catch one of these taxis? The trees are leafy, green. I don't know when this photo was taken, but probably spring, judging from the clothing and the lack of orange leaves. What appears to be tin huts: stalls in some kind of antique street market? Google won't let me go there to see.

Oh my. It suddenly looks like these photographs were not taken sequentially. This view shows the tin huts http://goo.gl/maps/ZPRL but this one from a few more feet down (meters? they're metric over there, right?) shows white tents in the same spot. Some sort of arts fair must have taken its place. http://goo.gl/maps/SJLe

Two large women are crossing the street, one is dragging behind her some luggage on wheels. Traffic light is red. A larger woman stands at the median. A man in a blue shirt stands waiting to cross the street with a manilla envelope in his left hand. What, pray tell, has happened to all of the pigeons of 1974? An ad reads 'GLAMOUR'. Oh, I have spotted a pigeon in the air! http://goo.gl/maps/8M7E Are you perhaps one of Perec's pigeon's great great grandchildren? Or maybe you're not a pigeon at all, too far to tell what kind of bird you are.

A black SmartCar, parked in front of what appears to be residences. I am moving down the street now, closer to Rue Bonaparte. A woman in a white sleeveless shirt and a blue purse next to men in coats. An apple green moped. Perec mentions a fountain decorated with the statues of four orators, but I cannot find it. Surely that would have survived if the travel agency survived. Where is it? Maybe it has migrated with the pigeons?

Still more Google-time has passed as I go down the road. Suddenly the residential building http://goo.gl/maps/u7eg is now covered in construction plastic http://goo.gl/maps/5wdZ it says: "traitement de facades" and even I can figure that one out despite my poor French. A woman with a very similar blue purse as the woman in the white sleeveless shirt is walking beside the building under construction. Now she is wearing many more layers. A traffic light is green.

I found it! The fountain and the statues! http://goo.gl/maps/Qvbx it seems that the white tents and (earlier/later... time is impossible in streetview) the tin huts had surrounded it and were obstructing its view. I'm so glad it's here, even though I had never seen it before. Why do I feel such relief? It is too far to make out the pigeons. Let me navigate to a better view. http://goo.gl/maps/SVO9 Incidentally, no pigeons.

At the end of the road, suddenly the white tents reappear. 'Alsacez-VOUS! a Paris..." it says. 20 or so mopeds and motorcycles have been cordoned off on the side of the street. A woman in a fierce violet jacket is walking fiercely. http://goo.gl/maps/xcG9 She is carrying an orange shopping bag. Her body, in the act of shopping, has the propulsive thrust of an Olympic gymnast. She is not ordinary or infra-ordinary, she is extraordinary.

DAY TWO.

I'm back on Google Streetview, feeling re-energized.

Not far from the woman wearing the fierce violet jacket: Two bookstores just a few steps from the Saint-Sulpice, surely one of these books on display is Perec's 'An Attempt'!

http://goo.gl/maps/K4LB
http://goo.gl/maps/3Iru

Incidentally, I just looked up 'photophagous'. It's not really a word, but apparently a play on the word phytophagous meaning "(esp. of an insect or other invertebrate) feeding on plants". I wonder what the original pun in French was.

Also, had a revelation during my break from Streetview. There is no clear indication that what I assumed was the subway station was indeed the subway station. Maybe it is the parking lot that features so prominently in 'Attempt'. If that is so, it would make sense that the cars 'dive' into it. If it is not so, then where is the parking lot?

Also have been re-reading Perec, and he briefly mentions a district council building, which I am pretty sure is the one next to the Mairie that is under reconstruction.

Police station. Police cars parked out front.

Spotted a 58 at the intersection of Rue Bonaparte and Rue de Vaugirard. I don't remember Perec mentioning the 58.

I think I'm kind of lost, so I'm going back to Cafe Mairie. Different view of the outdoor seating: http://goo.gl/maps/cAUZ Looks almost like student desks. A group of three elderly individuals (men or women? hard to tell with their faces blurred) talking leisurely. Another man appears to be reading the newspaper.

In the opposite direction, a woman in a white jacket and yellow purse walks by a green trashcan. Looking back at the opposite corner: the mopeds here are parked almost equidistant from each other, whereas they are usually bunched together in other places.

In the middle of the street, a young man in a denim jacket carrying an instrument and a young woman in a white jacket on her cell phone, carrying a yellow purse not unlike the earlier woman.

I always assumed this bus was the same as the 87 in the front view, but the side says 86: http://goo.gl/maps/lezW

The 86 just happens to be the most mentioned one in Perec's book, at least that is my impression.

And in fact, it is the 86 because the 87 from the front view has a different side. Two buses were in the same spot in two different views, and Google alternated these two time frames within the same street.

"The 86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Pres" Perec says.

I love how I have to keep backtracking on things I've said as I circle this block over and over again and understand more of what is going on and how Google has spliced together images from different times. What at first seems apparent gives way to multiple deceptions.

I feel oddly like I know this block very well now, when in reality this too is a deception. If I actually traveled to Saint Sulpice, I would be so lost. I would look for all these people, always rooted in their designated spots, as if they were landmarks, statues waiting for pigeons to land on, but they would all be gone.

It occurs to me that Streetview plays with time in a very interesting, almost artistic manner, when in fact it is a random outcome based on the different cameras' routes.

Three time frames:

1. tin hut/antique market (the 86 is in this time frame)
2. white tents in the same spot (the 87 is in this time frame)
3. no tents or huts, clear view to the fountain

There may be other time frames I am unaware of. I feel like a time traveler.

Here I can see the front of the 86, finally: http://goo.gl/maps/J96v

Here is the front of another bus. It could be the same 86, but I'm not sure. It is in the tin-hut time frame: http://goo.gl/maps/GVDF

MikiHouse is the name of the store on the corner of the residential building that is (in some time frames) under construction.

A tour bus that says Knipschild on it.

I think that if I keep going up and down this street I will unlock some kind of secret. I keep looking at the same people. Their frozen postures hold so many stories. Then I see new people too. New things that had escaped my attention the first time through. Each looking has more depth.

I see the same woman in the white sleeveless shirt, and I feel a sense of familiarity, like we've already met.

Tourist in all white and a yellow umbrella crossing the street. Further down Rue Bonaparte: Mom with stroller, baby on back. Dad walking beside her. Man with a baby blue book. Can't make out the title. White haired woman in black coat.

Here is a sign for the metro. So it is a metro afterall, and not a parking lot. Where is the parking lot Perec refers to?

Two bright green street sweepers parked on a corner. A few construction signs on the sidewalk. Corner of Bonaparte and Saint Sulpice.

Fierce woman in fierce violet jacket again. Feeling of familiarity.

In the other direction, asian woman in a pink top and blue jeans. Taxis. A silver Volkswagon with a sunroof. White tents.

A woman riding a bike very close to us. Carrying a small green purse. Tourist with a backpack and another bag slung over the shoulder crossing Saint Sulpice. Small Mercedes hatchback.

From this angle, another ramp leading down. Definitely looks more like a metro station than an underground parking lot. http://goo.gl/maps/wsTn

Starting over at the cafe, going down Place Saint Sulpice... another bookstore: http://goo.gl/maps/KnR0 Woman with shopping bag running down the sidewalk. Why the hurry? I see no taxis or buses nearby. Across the street a woman is unlocking her bike in front of the church.

Wandering off from the square seems like such a luxury. So many new sights and new people to see, easy eyecandy. New sights without effort, whereas in the square I have to strain my eyes to find something new (although every time there is something I've missed before).

Rare man with unblurred out face, looking back suspiciously at the camera: http://goo.gl/maps/cIKG I'm so used to seeing the veil of the blur that I feel oddly wrong, like a peeping tom, when I stare at his face, as if he were naked. But I cannot stop staring.

French taggers: http://goo.gl/maps/hMPr A store called JLR. A garbage truck. I've wandered kind of far now. I apologize if this review has stopped becoming entertaining. But it seems I am driven to look and re-look without any endpoint in sight, least of all entertainment.

A bit exhausted now. To be continued... (maybe)

[Glenn Russell]

CAFÉ DE LA MAIRE - One of the prime spots where Georges Perec records the swirl of life

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris - over the course of three days in October 1974, Georges Perec compiled hundreds of individual entries of instances of what he perceived in a certain local in Paris.

This dainty little forty-page Perec praline prospectus can be read several times in an afternoon. I encourage you to slow down and take your time - little will be gained zipping from page to page, most especially since in translator Marc Lowenthal's Afterward we read:

Attempt was one of Perec's clearer efforts to grapple with what he termed the "infraordinary": the marking and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives - "what happens," as he puts it here, "when nothing happens."

Between my own readings of Attempt, I kept reflecting on two bits from Georges' Species of Spaces, a highly provocative essay he wrote in the same year. Here's the duo with my comments:

"Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.”

Georges places the emphasis on seeing. Nearly all the many entries in Attempt are visual. For example: "Three children taken to school. Another apple-green 2CV" and "The street lamps progressively light up." Although there's the occasional hearing: "A funeral chimes stops." or feeling: "I went up to the second floor, a sad room, rather cold," Georges focuses on what his eyes perceive.

What I find curious is not once does Georges make mention of the sensation of his own breathing. For me, awareness of breath is rich and beautiful. If we hone our attention, we recognize the rhythm of breath occurs in four stages: inbreth, pause, outbreath, pause. The more we relax into the breath, the more we can have a direct experience of an entire universe opening up. Perhaps the simple fact that breathing is a constant is the very reason it is generally overlooked.

The second Species of Spaces quote is extraordinary: "To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?"

This is precisely what Georges does in Attempt. And with the emphasis on the alphabet, it's no accident his first two entres pertain to letters, beginning respectively: "Letters of the alphabet, words:"KLM"" and "Conventional symbols: arrows, under the "P" of the parking lot signs."

Thus we're given a glimpse of what it means to be a born writer, some may even say, a genius writer - an exceptional ability to convert the buzz of experience coming in through our five senses into elegant language. And recall Georges Perec's goal was to write a different book each and every time he set pen to paper or sat at his typer.

And Georges urged anyone aspiring to be a writer to do the same, proclaiming there's space enough for each of us.

In the end, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris can serve as inspiration, a door to the creative life. Thank you, Georges.



Again the pigeons go round the square



I am now at La Fontaine St-Sulpice, sitting with my back to the square: the cars and people in my line of sight are coming from the square or are getting ready to cross it (with the exception of some pedestrians coming from rue Bonaparte).



French author and space cadet extraordinaire, Georges Perec, 1936-1982

[Andrew]

It took me a little bit to fully accept the premise of this slender volume. Ostensibly, it's a description of everything going on in one place, with an odd fixation on buses. And at first I thought, "neat trick, but what's the point?" Then, the more I read, the more it came to me as a prose poem, an ode to the ebb and flow of urban life, to both the joys and the melancholy of being solitary in a great city. Honestly, all I wanted to do afterwards was sit out in front of the decrepit royal statue in the corner of Lumphini Park, watch the traffic split down Silom, Rama IV, and Ratchadamri Roads, the coming and going of metro trains, and take notes.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perec’s inventive 'Attempt' is a three-day stakeout of the mundane, an exercise in obsessive inconsequence.

Stationed at various cafés surrounding the Place Saint-Sulpice in October 1974, Perec turns surveillance into something between a low-stakes theological inquiry and a bureaucrat’s fever dream. His objective: to chronicle “that which is generally not taken note of,” to clock the world not when it struts but when it shuffles, mutters, or double-parks.

A stoic voyeur of micro-events—“a little girl with a blue balloon,” “a man with a pipe and black satchel,” “an apple-green 2CV”—he documents the banal with the zeal of a birdwatcher and the rhythm of a city timetable.

Buses are catalogued obsessively (the 63, 70, 84, 86, 87, 96—a commuter’s Gregorian chant), as are the dogs, strollers, tartlets, red hats with pom-poms, and inexplicable pigeon spirals. Even silence is footnoted: “Pause.” As if waiting for meaning to stumble into frame.

What masquerades as passivity becomes, over time, a kind of resistance. Perec performs a tactical strike against the tyranny of plot, character, and purpose. The work's heartbeat is repetition; time itself is dissected into its constituent ticks—"a policeman is still pacing,” “the rain stopped very suddenly,” “a cake-box in the shape of a little pyramid.”

And yet from this froth of incidentals, tiny dramas emerge with absurd intensity: a funeral overtaken by pigeons, a wedding jammed in traffic, a tourist bus whose passengers wear headphones with religious solemnity.

Perec’s inventory occasionally snags on its own futility—"Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my only goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me”—but it’s in this twitch of failure that the book takes on a quiet grandeur. The joke, of course, is that nothing is ever truly still: “People stumble. Micro-accidents.”

Perec, that lexical engineer and constraint connoisseur, was a founding member of Oulipo, the literary movement that believed creativity thrives under limitation. Known for A Void—his lipogrammatic novel that omits the letter “e”—and Life A User’s Manual, which reads like a Rubik’s Cube of Parisian apartment life, he took structure seriously, but solemnity less so.

An Attempt slots itself beside Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Apollinaire’s looping walks, and even the melancholic wanderings of Walter Benjamin, but it also prefigures our current algorithmic malaise, where meaning competes with metadata. At the end of the day it is an enjoyable writing experiment and an unusual reading experience.

What is the book “about”? Perhaps nothing—a man trying to outstare entropy with a biro and a café receipt. In the age of the quantified self and geotagged ephemera, Perec’s gentle madness feels less quaint than eerily prescient. This isn’t voyeurism; it’s liturgical attendance to the low hum of being. I’d rate it 87 buses out of 96, give or take a funeral wreath or a palmier.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Georges Perec wrote this fascinating little (very little but beautifully designed) book regarding one location in Paris, and documenting what was happening around that section. And that is basically it! Buses come and go, taxi stand, children walk by as others. Totally uninteresting and that is what's interesting about it.

Perec only records what's not interesting and by doing that he is capturing a series of moments that one never pays attention to. And there is a beauty to that. Also Perec is hysterical. His little side-comments are priceless and very dry. It is almost like reading notes from a detective at a stake-out (is that the term), but there is nothing to report! I love that.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

An experiment, and one ultimately doomed to failure; its failure, however, is also its greatest strength. It's essentially an extended list of details ("some cars dive into the parking lot./ an 86 [bus] passes by. A 70 passes by," etc, etc), something that would seem to make for a rather dull read.

But I found it one of the most invigorating reading experiences I've had in a long while. Not particularly, I admit, because of the text itself, but in the way that it suddenly made me breathlessly attuned to my surroundings, conscious of the tiny details of a particular time and a particular space that are easily (usually?) overlooked, ignored. I read this slenderest of texts as I sat at the small table in the front bay windows of a cafe I discovered last week and have returned to several times since, looking out on a side street that heretofore had seemed tranquil and practically empty (at least by San Francisco standards), but as I read it suddenly seemed bristling with activity, and I became hyper-aware of the pedestrians criss-crossing my direct field of vision, casually walking dogs, pushing strollers or talking on phones, of the wind occasionally causing the overhanging expanses of tree leaves to shudder uncontrollably, of the slightest glimpse of figures appearing in windows of the facing row of elegant Victorian-style houses…

And for that all-too-brief hour or so, the "infraordinary"—Perec's term for "the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of lives"—suddenly seemed quite extraordinary.



[I didn’t think of taking a photo myself, but I’m glad someone else did! I was at the table on the opposite window, however, and when I’ve been there there hasn’t been so much activity outside… I have no idea what the white stuff is on the window though. Photo by sparkle glowplug, found on flickr.]

Review cross-posted on my blog, Memories of the Future

[Jim Elkins]

An Attempt at Exhausting Writing Strategies

This is an excellent illustration of a problem with purely descriptive, unvoiced, constrained writing: the more it attempts to be "unoriginal" in Marjorie Perloff's sense, the more meaning is infused. Perec's project is to describe the "infraordinary": everything about this square in Paris that is not recorded in the history and tourism books, and, by implication, in novels. He spends a lot of his weekend noting what people are eating or carrying, and much of the first day noting when different buses go by. But even the first two pages are dense with implied narratives, and it is those narratives that give the project interest, not the lists of "infraordinary" events.

Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective or neutral standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the first session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. It's an interesing beginning, hinting the "attempt" might be an overgrown children's game. But by the bottom of the first page—six short paragraphs from the beginning—he writes:

"Ground: packed gravel and sand."

This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and an indication that his "attempts" will include subjects that will fail, since he won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) can also be read as announcements of the limits of his project:

"Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...
Asphalt
Trees (leafy, many yellowing)"

These are indications of refusals: the Flaubert of Madame Bovary, for example, might have written at length on each. Then, two more paragraphs down:

"Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)"

This is self-reflexive, a note on what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):

"Human beings"

Now the voice is ironic. In the space of one and a half very short pages, the voice has moved from rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), to obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. Then comes a heading:

"Trajectories
The 96 goes to Montparnasse station
The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret
The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayen..."

This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games.

All these shifts in just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. Since "exhaustion" in the sense of completion has long since gone by the board, this has to raise the question of whether there is an overall sense of what such an "attempt" might be, whether there's a game that comprehends these partial games.

An Attempt is interesting for the writer's restless and continuously renewed interest in different kinds of non-literary voices, not for the "attempt to describe" or for any notion of the "infraordinary"—and certainly not for the "unoriginal" or "inexpressive" qualities more recent writers ascribe to Oulipo and related constrained writing. There's not much "constrained" about this book, except the author's self-imposed unmoving vantage point. The very project of the "infraordinary" is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that float and assemble in the writer's mind.

If Perec has an interest in exhaustion and completion, it's not the sort that results from listing items despite their endlessly "inexpressive" nature: rather it's the exhaustion of his inventory of possible topics for lists or rules for lists, and even there he fails to finish, because it's easy to think of other principles of selection and listing. The overall effect, for me, is a project whose interest is the author's inconstant frame of mind. He sits in a café, determined to write in an unusual, affectless, rule-bound, "infraordinary" manner, but he doesn't have an interest in completing any list, or putting his lists or principles of lists in order. He's bored, intermittently engaged, easily distracted. It's only an occasionally engaging experience, and its scattered and partial moments of radicality and surprise are enough.

(Revised April 2024)

[Yasemin Ugur · Rating 4 out of 5]

1974 yılının ekim ayında bir adam Paris’te çoğunlukla “la mairie Kafesi” olmak üzere çeşitli kafelere oturup etrafında gördüğü herşeyi en küçük detayına kadar anlatmaya koyuluyor. Tüm bu gözlemleri bu kitapta topluyor. Nesneler, otobüsler, insanlar, hayvanlar(özellikle güvercinler), hava durumu, ışık tonları, dünden bugüne eklenen yeni görüntülerin özellikleri tek tek sıralanıyor. Okurken anlatılan her bir görüntü bahsedilen mekanda olma hissini örüntülemek için beynin arka planında bir tablonun parçaları gibi kendini tamamlıyor. Peki adı neden “bir Paris semtinin tüketilme denemesi”? Bence Nedeni: benzeri görüntüler içinde geçen zaman!! Farklı bir anlatım ve kurgu! herkesin yaptığını yazabilme yalınlığı...

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Georges Perec liked to try things in his writing. Experiments. Could he write a novel without the letter "e," for example? Could he make a memoir consisting only of sentences that begin "I remember," he wondered? How about a 1200-word palidrome?

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is another of Perec's experiments. He spent three days at Place Saint-Sulpice recording everything he saw---buses, people, pigeons, and more---and the result is this little fifty-ish page book. Perec was in search of the "infraordinary," which he defined as "what happens when nothing happens."

I'd say he found it.

So, is this a book you need to read? Barbara, who complained last night at book club at the slowness of The Wind in the Willows? Barbara should skip this one. But if you are like me and get an odd sense of pleasure from quirky books? Yep, spend the seven bucks on a used copy somewhere and take a close look at this one.

[Basho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember that scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray is sitting outside dictating out loud everything that is going to happen in town as it happens? Wind blows, car passes, etc. This book is just like that.

[Gerasimos Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very weird book and it made for an interesting reading experience. The book is literally a long list that the author writes sitting in a cafe in Paris for 3 days describing every single thing that passes out of the window. There is no story to it, no cohesion, just literally a laundry list of every single detail of everything that he sees. It made me feel like when you repeat a word again and again and after a while it loses meaning. This is how this book felt by the end. The details didn't make sense anymore and even though the descriptions were still realistic it made for a very surreal experience. I can't give it more than 3 stars because even though I really appreciate it for what it is and for pushing the boundaries of storytelling, I can't say I enjoyed it. I was bored out of mind. Which is kind of what the book sets out to do though. So maybe, in that sense, it's extremely successful... Hmm....

[Alexandra]

Een ode naar het rondkijken!

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life Sneaks In

— Ground: packed gravel and sand
— Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a church, buildings…
— Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
— A rather big chunk of sky (maybe one-sixth of my field of vision)
— A cloud of pigeons that suddenly swoops down on the central plaza, between the church and fountain
— Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
— Human beings
— Some sort of basset hound
— Bread (baguette)
— Lettuce (curly endive?) partially emerging from a shopping bag

Journal entries from a man sitting in a Parisian square, at various cafes at various times over a three-day period beginning Friday, October 18, 1974. The church is the Eglise Saint-Sulpice; the fountain and buildings are among the most distinguished in Paris; but Georges Perec has no desire to add to the amount that others have written about them. "My intention," he tells us in a brief preface, "was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds."

Reading this through last night (the tiny 50-page book can easily be read in an hour), I was most conscious of the objectivity of it all. The observations are punctuated by notes about passing buses ("An 86 passes by. An 87 passes by. A 63 passes by"), the number of taxis waiting at the rank, the deliveries to nearby stores. It seemed dry, but curiously fascinating, the polar opposite of normal travel writing, yet indelibly etching a precise portrait of a particular place and time.

Writing out the passage above this morning, though, I am struck by something else: how human it is. Try as Perec might to remain objective, life sneaks in. And once in, it will not leave. That "rather big chunk of sky" (thanks to Mark Lowenthal for his no-nonsense translation) occupies maybe one-sixth of his field of vision. Even now, at the top of only the second page, the author has become a person, not just a camera. The cloud of pigeons are living things in unpredictable action. The human beings are still anonymous for now, but that baguette represents a whole way of life, and the maybe-curly-endive emerging from the shopping bag could be material for an entire short story. Even so, what a wonderful surprise to see this entry on page 14: "A 96 passes by, stops before the bus stop (Saint-Sulpice section); off it steps Geneviève Serreau, who takes rue des Canettes; I get her attention by knocking on the windowpane, and she comes over to say hello."

A lot has to do, though, with layout. Print each observation as a single line, and it stirs the imagination. Put them all together in a single paragraph, and you get a montage, LIFE flashing in neon, rather than an object for quiet contemplation:

I again saw buses, taxis, cars, tourist buses, trucks and vans, bikes, mopeds, Vespas, motorcycles, a postal delivery tricycle, a motorcycle-school vehicle, a driving-school car, elegant women, aging beaus, old couples, groups of children, people with bags, satchels, suitcases, dogs, pipes, umbrellas, potbellies, old skins, old schmucks, young schmucks, idlers, deliverymen, scowlers, windbags. I also saw Jean-Paul Aron, and the proprietor of the Trois Canettes restaurant, whom I had already seen this morning.

Perec was a member of the Oulipo group (Organization for Potential Literature), which sought to discipline writing though artificially imposed constraints—most famously in Perec's La disparition (translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void ), a 300-page novel entirely eliminating the letter "e". But the beauty of constraint comes, not from the demonstration of what you cannot do, but from the glorious emergence of what you can. In his self-imposed objectivity, Perec attempts an exhaustive catalogue of the everyday objects in a Paris square. But everywhere, life sneaks in; the impersonal has become personal again, magnificently so.

Or has it? Look at this another way, from the top of one of the towers of the church, say. Here is this 38-year-old-man sitting alone at a cafe table, nursing a beer or a gentian, watching the world go by. He sees some people he knows, yes; he even greets a few of them; but they pass on by, leaving him to his task. Is there not something lonely in his detachment, as though looking through the window at a party to which he has not been invited? Perhaps I am making this up. But it is hard not to recall that this first-generation Frenchman is in fact a Holocaust orphan of Czech Jewish ancestry. Would I be wrong to see in his meticulous anatomizing of the Parisian cityscape something of the same search for identity that characterizes the work of his slightly younger contemporary, also a Jewish orphan, Patrick Modiano?

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tentativa es un ejercicio literario, un experimento más de la vasta obra de Perec.
El francés creó atractivos juegos verbales y lingüísticos, indagaciones lúdicas, etc. que escapan de los limites formales y conocidos de la literatura.

En este caso, se sentó varias veces en una plaza y sus alrededores y se dedicó a narrar lo que veía. Acá tenemos el resultado; gente, ómnibus, edificios, nubes, colores.

El autor dice que los diarios hablan de todo, salvo de lo diario. Estos aburren, no enseñan nada, no nos interrogan, no responden a nuestras preguntas. Falta lo banal, lo cotidiano, lo evidente, lo común, lo ordinario, lo que realmente pasa, lo que vivimos. Esta obra trata de eso mismo, de acorralar las cosas comunes, darles sentido, sorprendernos con ellas.

Prometo hacer un ejercicio similar y agregarlo a esta review.

[Damla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yarım saatlik kafa dağıtma gibi bir şey oldu. Onun gördükleriyle dikkatimin dağılmadığı anlarda kelimelerinin bana gösterdikleri ne kadar uyuştu bilemeyiz, ama en azından hiç görmediğim 1974'ü okumuş oldum. Yine de kesin bunu yazması okumaktan daha eğlenceli olmuştur.

[Jip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik HOU van Georges Perec. Wilde deze eigenlijk het liefst in het Nederlands lezen, maar die versie blijkt echt nergens meer gedrukt te worden, dus toch uiteindelijk maar de Engelse uitgave gekocht.

Een boek over mensen kijken. In Parijs. Meer dan dat is het niet en meer dan dat hoeft het ook helemaal niet te zijn. Het is perfect.

tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy

It is five after four. Weary eyes. Weary words.

Several women in shades of green

[Lisa Huissoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

waarom las ik dit nu pas

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perec's short book is an Oulipo-inspired attempt to record the "infraordinary" things which no one pays any attention to. In the space of 50 pages, he tries to record all that passes his field of vision, but as he (and the reader) quickly discover, it isn't really possible to see everything. Instead, as he makes his attempt, you start to imagine the Place Saint-Sulpice, and even though we're not sitting next to him nor looking through his eyes, an anxiety arises in the reader, "Is he seeing everything? Did he see all the dogs? pedestrians? pigeons? Is that really the same yellow car he saw earlier?" And as his list grows, we're compelled to ask what purpose might this exercise serve? while at the same time wondering if we shouldn't be more observant of the world passing by.

Coincidentally, I happened to have sat on one of the benches in Place Saint-Sulpice which Perec describes. During a visit in July, 2011, I had just finished a visit to the church and sat down with my wife to relax a bit and enjoy the beautiful fountain. Reading Perec's descriptions, it was easy to re-imagine that half hour spent over a year ago, listening to the fountain and cars and children as the buses passed behind us and the Parisians hurried on to the rue des Canettes, not seeing us on the bench any more than any big city dweller takes notice of anything other than their wristwatch and any people/objects that might be on a collision course with.

A very short read which can be done in less than an hour, but one which a writer, or would-be writer might meditate on when considering questions of description and setting - what to include, what to notice, what to reject.

[Mateo R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

No se me escapa el hecho de estar leyendo un texto en el que el escritor toma notas muy específicas de lo que ocurre en cierto lugar durante cierta cantidad de horas, detectando acontecimientos mundanos y acciones de transeúntes, mientras yo tomo notas específicas sobre lo que leo, detectando figuras recurrentes y alusiones a textos y personas.

El texto es fascinante como ejercicio o experiencia, aunque por momentos puede ser algo monótono. Como con El arte y la manera de abordar a su jefe de sector para pedirle un aumento, una vez que llevo un rato leyéndolo, entro en una especie de trance. Parafraseando al texto: se puede imaginar que se está en la Plaza de Saint-Sulpice en París, donde por otra parte nunca estuve.

Intertextualidad

Menciones directas
* Mención al perro Milú de la serie de historietas Las aventuras de Tintín (1929-86) de Hergé.
* Mención a la película El gran Gatsby (1974), basada en la novela El gran Gatsby (1925) de F. Scott Fitzgerald.
* Mención al personaje de Sherlock Holmes, detective inglés de finales del s. XIX que usa la observación y el razonamiento deductivo, cuya primera mención registrada está en Estudio en escarlata (1887) de Arthur Conan Doyle.
* Mención a los autores:
-Jacobo Benigno Bossuet (Francia, s. XVII-XVIII)
-François Fénelon (Francia, s. XVI-XVII)
-Esprit Fléchier (Francia, s. XVII-XVIII)
-Jean Baptiste Massillon (Francia, s. XVII-XVIII)
-Jean-Paul Aron (Francia, s. XX)
-Jean Duvignaud (Francia, s. XX-XXI)
-Michel Mohrt (Francia, s. XX-XXI)
-Paul Virilio (Francia, s. XX-XXI)

[Julien L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

C’est un écrit qui ne raconte rien et dont il ne restera rien mais c’est là tout l’intérêt du sujet !

Perec va sillonner la place Saint-Sulpice en s’asseyant de cafés en cafés et de bancs en bancs. Il ne racontera pas les grands événements mais justement ceux dont on ne parle pas, les petits actes de la vie courante.
Si courants, qu’on les voit défiler sous nos yeux tous les jours sans nous en rendre compte.

Il fera l’inventaire de tout ce sur quoi ses yeux se posent. Une énumération des bus qui passent bondés ou vides, des enfants qui jouent, les pigeons toujours plus nombreux comme une armée qui envahit Paris, des passants dont il remarque qu’une main est toujours occupée (à porter un journal ou une baguette ou à tenir une canne ou la laisse de son chien).

Écrire sur le vide et prouver qu’il est rempli de petites choses. Il suffit d’y prêter un regard sans attente et vous obtiendrez tout.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing happened and yet, I’m feeling like I was just told a story. With this brief, 50-page writing experiment, Perec makes one ask: What is to be gained by zooming in on the little things, by getting lost in the details?
If much of novel writing is about capturing a snapshot of a time and place, Perec does that here with no characters, no action, no interior thoughts or motives. The reader is left feeling like they know this little square in Paris. It’s the melancholy of a sunset—another day over, time passing—-and also its beauty, being found in the ephemera of a dropped cellophane wrapper or someone walking by with a cake box. This is life, its shades and contours and framework. The details are present, the stage is set.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only makes notes of dogs, never cats

[Quinty Nella]

Het is kwart over vijf. Ik heb zin om mijn zinnen te verzetten. Le monde te lezen. Ergens anders heen te gaan. Pauze. (22)

[g · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an edited version of my review, originally posted here: http://ginachoe.com/2012/01/oulipo-ma...

An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in Paris is, essentially, a list. Perec set out to catalog the infraordinary, “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”; or, those things that are oft ignored or unnoticed. Attempt is the result of this endeavor, which Perec carries out from various vantage points in the bustling Place Saint-Sulpice. Over a three-day period in October 1974, he infers–“A priest returning from a trip (there is an airline label hanging from his satchel)”; he sees friends and a possible doppelganger; he finds a man who shares the same idiosyncratic manner of holding his cigarettes: between his middle and ring fingers; and sees a dog that “looks like Snowy” (Tintinophiles will recognize the young reporter’s four-legged sidekick, also known as Milou).

What you’ll recognize in this slim book is Perec’s microscopic attention to detail that figures in A Void. And his wry humor. In his afterward, translator Mark Lowenthal mentions Perec’s aim to become an absolute writer; “Perec’s legacy lies more in the effort he made in seeing and taking note of everything.” But, as Lowenthal notes, there are limitations, specifically cultural and temporal, that make this a noble but futile endeavor.

Perec’s observations of the hustle and bustle of Place Saint-Sulpice would differ greatly from, say, those of an American. Or even a fellow Frenchman of a different generation. And time, even a mere three days, works against Perec: "What has changed here since yesterday? At first sight, it’s really the same. Is the sky perhaps cloudier? It would really be subjective to say that there are, for example, fewer people or fewer cars. There are no birds to be seen. There is a dog on the plaza. Over the hôtel Récamier (far behind it?) a crane stands out in the sky (it was there yesterday, but I don’t recall making note of it). I couldn’t say whether the people I’m seeing are the same ones as yesterday, whether the cars are the same ones as yesterday. On the other hand, if the birds (pigeons) came (and why wouldn’t they come) I’d feel sure they would be the same birds."

And later: "Yesterday, there was a metro ticket on the sidewalk, right in front of my window; today there is, not exactly in the same spot, a candy wrapper (cellophane) and a piece of paper difficult to identify (a little bigger than a “Parisiennes” wrapper but a much lighter blue."

Perec also admits to another limitation: his position, literally where he is situated in the square, prevents him from seeing all. He can only take note of what is happening in his line of sight. “(Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my own goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking)”
....
On one hand, you can’t help but wonder why Perec bothered to do something that was impossible and why readers would be interested in this effort. At points, the list is exhaustive and unenlightening–do we really care which busses passed through the Place?; however, the number of pages that “nothing” fills is remarkable. While full of the mundane, Attempt does give us a sense of how much we miss when we are oblivious to the space around those things that we deem important. It offers us a glimpse of what we might see should we choose to observe the things that would go by unnoticed. Undoubtedly, this is a book for the Oulipian enthusiast (guilty) but other creative types could benefit from emulating Perec.

[Tabi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's very hard to rate this book, considering it's such an unique kind of non-fiction. Perec sits in a cafe and observes everything that happends at a busy square in Paris. He writes down and documents the small details of a brief shared existence at that particular point in time. 1974, Paris, here is what real daily life is. So 3 stars because I enjoy this concept and because it was done well enough, though the writing itself is not really remarkable.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

So lulling. Hard to read quickly, I found, because it is made up of attention to detail, and to skim that is to ignore the purpose of the text. I reread certain parts about the passing of various bus lines, for example.

Very interesting from a cultural perspective, too - the translator's note mentions the difficulties of translating things such as a "palmier" bag, or the que-sais-je series of educational books.

Now I just need to read it in French.

[Black Glove · Rating 3 out of 5]

The light of day
Perec's brief field-of-vision experiment will appeal mostly to writers. The way it strips back writing to the bare minimum of factual observation and yet still a work of literature is created. It's like hitting a reset button on the over-thinking imagination. Shows how something so simple and basic as note-taking can produce a meaningful narrative of sorts. Its purity of intent is solidly interesting.