Georges Perec Books In Order

Things

With the American publication of Life, a User’s Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was immediately recognized in the U.S. as one of this century’s most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today’s readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our obsession with society’s trappings the seductive mass of Things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning. Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. ‘They wanted life’s enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership.’ Surrounded by Paris’s tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of ‘the film they would have liked to live’ and the reality of life’s daily mundanities. In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie’s cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs ‘to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep.’ Yearning to exist on neutral ground as ‘a blessed parenthesis,’ he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat. Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec’s unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate.

A Void

The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl’s penchant for word games, especially for ‘lipograms,’ compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl’s verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances…
A Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician, acrobat, and sad eyed clown. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300 page novel that never once employs the letter E. Adair’s translation, too, is astounding; Time called it ‘a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss.’

W. or the Memory of Childhood

From the author of Life: A User’s Manual Godine, 1987 comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer’s effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Na*zi occupation of France. Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec’s W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author’s wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic ‘ideal,’ where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry. As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where ‘it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving,’ and ‘you have to fight to live…
with no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out.’ Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, rape common, stealing encouraged and violence a fact of life. Perec’s interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those ‘shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores’? How did this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?

Life

Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante’s Commedia and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce’s Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 Perec’s spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondisseme*nt of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or sometimes quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

53 Days

Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User’s Manual Godine, 1987 and A Void, was working on this ‘literary thriller’ at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty eight, but left extensive drafts and notes supplying the rest of the mystery, as well as numerous twists and subplots. From these notes, his friends and fellow novelists Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud have assembled the elements of the unfinished mystery, along the way providing the reader with a fascinating view into the author’s mind as he constructed his literary conundrum. Absorbing, allusive, and joyously playful, ‘53 Days‘ is the ultimate detective story. The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime writer Robert Serval, who has mysteriously disappeared. Serval has left behind the manuscript of his last, unfinished novel, which may contain clues to his fate. From this beginning, Perec lures the reader into a labyrinth of mirror stories whose solutions can only be glimpsed before they in turn recede around the corner. In the tradition of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Perec’s ‘53 Days‘ is a supremely satisfying, engrossing, and truly original mystery. Like his previous work, it is also ‘a kaleidoscope of ingenious juxtapositions’ Le Monde from one of the century’s most inventive and important writers. As Harry Mathews has commented, ‘If death had not prevented Georges Perec from completing this book, we would today be reading a masterpiece, one in the mold of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.’

3 By Perec

Perec has rightfully assumed his position in the pantheon of truly original writers of the past century. Godine has issued all but one of is his books in this country, including his masterpiece Life, A User’s Manual. Here, in one volume, are three ‘easy pieces’ by the master of the verbal firecracker and Gallic wit. The novella ‘The Exeter Text’ contains all those e’s that were omitted from A Void Perec hated waste and no other vowel honest. In ‘Which Moped with Chrome Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?’ we are introduced to Sergeant Henri Pollak and his vehicle the aforementioned moped that carried him between Vincennes and Montparnasse; in ‘A Gallery Portrait’, the sensation of the 1913 exhibition in Pittsburgh depicts the artists’ patron, beer baron Hermann Raffke, sitting in front of his huge art collection, which includes of course ‘A Gallery Portrait’ of the baron sitting before ‘A Gallery Portrait,’ etc.

Species of Spaces

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec’s non fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

Ellis Island

Over three million people visit Ellis Island, the ‘Golden Door to America,’ every year. Ellis Island has become an invaluable resource center on immigration and genealogy as well as a national tourist attraction, widely praised for its excellent displays and informative exhibits. Now, the best of the Ellis Island Museum is available to readers everywhere from The Ellis Island Statue of Liberty Foundation. Fascinating primary source documents offer an exciting overview of Ellis Island, placing it in historical context with a concise history of immigration and global migration. This comprehensive guide is a must for anyone interested in immigration in general and Ellis Island in particular.

Ellis Island: A Reader and Resource Guide includes Entry interviews with immigrants
Descriptions of mental and physical health evaluations
Oral histories and memoirs of immigrants and immigration officers
Correspondence from the 1921 Commissioner of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor
Census information on immigrants
Photographs and prints from the 1800s to the present
Maps, charts, graphs, and political cartoons
Activities and topics for writing and discussion
A bibliography of related materials: books, videos, and CD ROMs

Thoughts of Sorts

Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec’s final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985. With this translation, David Bellos, Perec’s preeminent translator, has completed the Godine list of Perec’s great works translated into English and has provided an introduction to this master of systematic versatility. Thoughts of Sorts; is a compilation of musings and essays attempting to circumscribe, in Perec’s words, my experience of the world not in terms of the reflections it casts in distant places, but at its actual point of breaking surface. Perec investigates the ways by which we define our place in the world, reveling in list making, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and, as the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical/atypical Perec fashion.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

Never before published fiction by the master novelist, this darkly funny, subversive story is also a profound examination of the psychology of the worker and the workplace.A long suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the coming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What’s the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn t offer you a seat when you go into his office? Would it be a smart move to ask about his daughter s illness? Never previously published, Georges Perec s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity and possibly his sanity as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to ideas and innovation. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec s Woody Allen esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.