Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

genius, 14 Apr 2004
The cleverest man who ever died, bit doesnt make you feel stupid- only more aware of the things and words around you. A great accompanyment to "A Void" and "Life..." and a reasonable introduction to Oulipo.

Question your teaspoons!, 23 Oct 2002
I'm a big fan of Mr Perec and other Oulipo writers, and I reckon this is a fine introduction to his range and vitality as a writer. I return to the different pieces again and again, they are thought-provoking and insightful by turns. Especially good are Think/classify, the title-piece and his thoughts on fashion. In these short works, his interest in penetrating the world we inhabit through the things around us often termed mundane is really refreshing. Sociology is made accessible here and distilled with literary and linguistic knowledge to make a quite unique mix.

For such a technical master, Perec also manages to move on an emotive level - Rue Vilin is a piece about periodic returns to the street where his ma lived before she was taken by the Nazis. Also, the analysis of his psycho analysis is revealing without ever saying too much.

Finally, the translations manage to keep the readability of the selections very well I thought.

One criticism is that there were not more pieces included, perhaps some more Oulipo related work might have been put in - there is not much of this translated into English, although it is maybe not the easiest of tasks to do well.

Thought-provoking if characteristically erratic collection, 25 Jan 2001
Originally commissioned by his architect friend, Species of Spaces is a meditation on the spaces which we occupy and the ways in which we order them. Forming the main section of this book, it is also one of its highlights: original, informed and often witty. It's a piece which takes a fresh look at what surrounds us, offering a refreshing perspective on how we live. The rest of the book is taken up with a collection of pieces ranging from the autobiographical to the surreal. Some of these pieces are extremely compelling pieces of storytelling, while others give you an insight into the oblique perspective of Perec. Occasionally, however, there is a weaker piece which, being a completist text, it is naturally hard to avoid. But this considered, as a whole the book is a special collection which should form part of any Perec fan's bookcase.

Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

genius, 14 Apr 2004
The cleverest man who ever died, bit doesnt make you feel stupid- only more aware of the things and words around you. A great accompanyment to "A Void" and "Life..." and a reasonable introduction to Oulipo.

Question your teaspoons!, 23 Oct 2002
I'm a big fan of Mr Perec and other Oulipo writers, and I reckon this is a fine introduction to his range and vitality as a writer. I return to the different pieces again and again, they are thought-provoking and insightful by turns. Especially good are Think/classify, the title-piece and his thoughts on fashion. In these short works, his interest in penetrating the world we inhabit through the things around us often termed mundane is really refreshing. Sociology is made accessible here and distilled with literary and linguistic knowledge to make a quite unique mix.

For such a technical master, Perec also manages to move on an emotive level - Rue Vilin is a piece about periodic returns to the street where his ma lived before she was taken by the Nazis. Also, the analysis of his psycho analysis is revealing without ever saying too much.

Finally, the translations manage to keep the readability of the selections very well I thought.

One criticism is that there were not more pieces included, perhaps some more Oulipo related work might have been put in - there is not much of this translated into English, although it is maybe not the easiest of tasks to do well.

Thought-provoking if characteristically erratic collection, 25 Jan 2001
Originally commissioned by his architect friend, Species of Spaces is a meditation on the spaces which we occupy and the ways in which we order them. Forming the main section of this book, it is also one of its highlights: original, informed and often witty. It's a piece which takes a fresh look at what surrounds us, offering a refreshing perspective on how we live. The rest of the book is taken up with a collection of pieces ranging from the autobiographical to the surreal. Some of these pieces are extremely compelling pieces of storytelling, while others give you an insight into the oblique perspective of Perec. Occasionally, however, there is a weaker piece which, being a completist text, it is naturally hard to avoid. But this considered, as a whole the book is a special collection which should form part of any Perec fan's bookcase.

"E's are good" ...?, 14 Nov 2008
Okay, the temptation here is to write a lipogrammatical review, but to be honest - much as I enjoyed the examples below - there is probably a need for a few "straight" reviews as well, to let everyone know what an extraordinary book this is.

A novel of more than 300 pages without the letter "E" is already impressive just as an intellectual feat, in sheer Guinness-book-of-records, well-fancy-that terms. It's hard enough in French, but arguably even harder in English, so full marks to Gilbert Adair for his black-belt skills in translation. (Think about it a moment: no "the"; no "he", "she", "we" or "they".)

However, while this is always a witty book and occasionally an overtly funny one (Perec's E-free translations of Hamlet's soliloquy and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are hilarious), this is a serious book, full of Perec's usual combination of gentle melancholy with serious philosophical questions.

Anton Vowl and his chums, representing the six vowels (with "Y" included) and disappearing one by one in bizarre and mysterious circumstances, know something is missing from their lives but can't figure what; indeed generally fail to make sense of their world. What does the missing "e" represent? What is our own missing "e"?

And isn't it scary how quickly, reading this book, we get used to the absence of something as commonplace as the most frequently used letter in the alphabet? (A possible metaphor for Europe after the Holocaust, or the like?)

Like all Perec, "A Void" is serious fun, but ultimately decidedly unsettling. He certainly makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Georges Perec - A Void, 12 Nov 2008
Remarkable! Though it is a more an intellectual exercise than an intelligible work of fiction (though, of course it *is* an intelligible work of fiction, otherwise the exercise would render itself pointless), a Void is delightful and delightfully clever experience. It strains credibility, credulity, and sometimes, through its oft-necessarily torturous syntax and plotting that internally reflects the conceit of a novel written with a vital piece missing, though concomitant then with an inability to mention it, but it's still fun throughout, often hilarious, and a very rewarding book to have read. Philosophical, full of big plots and little, it's a difficult read but a worthwhile one. Oh yes!

This you should study, ask not why, 07 Nov 2008
This significant book, who's linguistically cunning author calls for no introduction, strains against a troublingly unjust handicap... in fact, two. It informs of a tall story, that of Anton Vowl, a similar champion of virtuoso wordplay who is lost to a churning, sorrowful world without warning, thus provoking a fatal inquiry amongst bosom companions and distant contacts both, all of whom follow suit in shrugging off this mortal coil by turns - but within this account of bodily vanishings lurks a vast conundrum of non-inclusion, a puzzling confrontation orbiting around a pivotal lack so mammoth, so voluminous in its span as to thwart plausibility, whilst still so small as to prohibit our noticing it at all.

Still, this sacrificial act, this abdication, this hamstringing is an affliction which it inflicts by will, a pain which it truly wants, and no word said (nor any action) can or should bring a mitigatory balm to this masochistic, if not outright sadistic, mutilation. In a word - this book is an avowal (thank you) that no trick of lingual manipulation is out of bounds for our national patois, nor that of its Gallic originator. In this it triumphs grandly, though that victory occurs at a total cost of simplicity of communication, vigorously slamming shut its highly-wrought doors upon any unlucky digits of cursory curiosity too dozy to pull away. But what bounty awaits stoical inquiry - in particular a work of brilliant rhyming skill, amongst a (now painfully shorn) handful of gracious nods to prior wordsmiths of no small acclaim.

On an opposing, still thumb-sporting hand, it is to an additional cross (born out of admiration, I will admit, but anyway) that I must turn my angry focus upon. On first sight of its striking bindings this book displays its own solitary flaw, imparting a critical hint as to what is at hand; and in all writings on this topic it is as if divulging A Void's cryptic crux is a vital goal, as if baring its soul without just sanction is to show apt approbation or, put simply, to do it honour. Sadly, to my mind this only subtracts from any summing of its multifariously loquacious parts, and not as its author originally did.

It is, probably, possibly, a foolish wish, an Utopian illusion that such a book as this could both flourish and still maintain its ambiguous shroud; for who could withstand this typographic storm, who would voluntarily swallow such an occasionally sour tasting pill without knowing why, what man or woman is willing to climb so high an obstruction as this, with no conscious motivation for attaining its final summit? How fitting, though, how chivalrous to abstain: to stand back from broadcasting all, from shouting on rooftops, from crowing with abandon; from cutting to, and out, its pounding corazón and draining off its blood; to simply say, "this you should study, ask not why".

In fact, I cannot bring my own musings to a conclusion in such a way as to risk committing a similarly criminal act on my part. What can I say to sum up my thoughts? Ah, I know - though in choosing my closing words I may unwittingly clarify, not mask. But I shall stop writing now with this, in summary of A Void:

Georges Perec's exemplary achievement - deliberate elementary absence, ever expressed, never revealed - comprehensively exceeds expectations. However, foreknowledge undermines these endeavours; excessively free reviewers threaten depreciating every newcomer's revelatory experience. Perec's perfectly perforated, entirely incomplete, pervasively evasive piece deserves better; mere readers likewise.

Awesome !, 02 Sep 2008
I read this book years ago, after it was mentioned in an editorial of a magazine I was reading. Totally intregued, I went straight out and bought it. Read it. Marvelled at it.
Perec has become one of my favourite authors since.
And to make it all the more perfect - he then wrote Three - a short story where the only vowel is E !! He had to use them up!
Read it - if only to be suitably awed.

An amusing floccinaucinihilipilification, 14 Aug 2008
Random thoughts on first coming into contact with this book:
1. Which imp is disposing of a particular mark throughout this folio?
2. What can such disposal do to this unassuming appraisal?
3. Which man, following an author in disposing of Anton Vowl, slipping a hint as to whodunnit in virtually all this book's paragraphs, would put his sign to such a work of translation? Gilb Adair? A triumph.

Which should work by way of illustration, amplifying your grasp of this paradox of a voluminous pratting about - a book, a fantasy of aristocracy and policing, which our author (originally GP, not GA) took a contract to construct without using a particular - shall I say - mark? 5 stars, nay, an infinity of stars for such a victory against customary linguistics!

Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

genius, 14 Apr 2004
The cleverest man who ever died, bit doesnt make you feel stupid- only more aware of the things and words around you. A great accompanyment to "A Void" and "Life..." and a reasonable introduction to Oulipo.

Question your teaspoons!, 23 Oct 2002
I'm a big fan of Mr Perec and other Oulipo writers, and I reckon this is a fine introduction to his range and vitality as a writer. I return to the different pieces again and again, they are thought-provoking and insightful by turns. Especially good are Think/classify, the title-piece and his thoughts on fashion. In these short works, his interest in penetrating the world we inhabit through the things around us often termed mundane is really refreshing. Sociology is made accessible here and distilled with literary and linguistic knowledge to make a quite unique mix.

For such a technical master, Perec also manages to move on an emotive level - Rue Vilin is a piece about periodic returns to the street where his ma lived before she was taken by the Nazis. Also, the analysis of his psycho analysis is revealing without ever saying too much.

Finally, the translations manage to keep the readability of the selections very well I thought.

One criticism is that there were not more pieces included, perhaps some more Oulipo related work might have been put in - there is not much of this translated into English, although it is maybe not the easiest of tasks to do well.

Thought-provoking if characteristically erratic collection, 25 Jan 2001
Originally commissioned by his architect friend, Species of Spaces is a meditation on the spaces which we occupy and the ways in which we order them. Forming the main section of this book, it is also one of its highlights: original, informed and often witty. It's a piece which takes a fresh look at what surrounds us, offering a refreshing perspective on how we live. The rest of the book is taken up with a collection of pieces ranging from the autobiographical to the surreal. Some of these pieces are extremely compelling pieces of storytelling, while others give you an insight into the oblique perspective of Perec. Occasionally, however, there is a weaker piece which, being a completist text, it is naturally hard to avoid. But this considered, as a whole the book is a special collection which should form part of any Perec fan's bookcase.

"E's are good" ...?, 14 Nov 2008
Okay, the temptation here is to write a lipogrammatical review, but to be honest - much as I enjoyed the examples below - there is probably a need for a few "straight" reviews as well, to let everyone know what an extraordinary book this is.

A novel of more than 300 pages without the letter "E" is already impressive just as an intellectual feat, in sheer Guinness-book-of-records, well-fancy-that terms. It's hard enough in French, but arguably even harder in English, so full marks to Gilbert Adair for his black-belt skills in translation. (Think about it a moment: no "the"; no "he", "she", "we" or "they".)

However, while this is always a witty book and occasionally an overtly funny one (Perec's E-free translations of Hamlet's soliloquy and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are hilarious), this is a serious book, full of Perec's usual combination of gentle melancholy with serious philosophical questions.

Anton Vowl and his chums, representing the six vowels (with "Y" included) and disappearing one by one in bizarre and mysterious circumstances, know something is missing from their lives but can't figure what; indeed generally fail to make sense of their world. What does the missing "e" represent? What is our own missing "e"?

And isn't it scary how quickly, reading this book, we get used to the absence of something as commonplace as the most frequently used letter in the alphabet? (A possible metaphor for Europe after the Holocaust, or the like?)

Like all Perec, "A Void" is serious fun, but ultimately decidedly unsettling. He certainly makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Georges Perec - A Void, 12 Nov 2008
Remarkable! Though it is a more an intellectual exercise than an intelligible work of fiction (though, of course it *is* an intelligible work of fiction, otherwise the exercise would render itself pointless), a Void is delightful and delightfully clever experience. It strains credibility, credulity, and sometimes, through its oft-necessarily torturous syntax and plotting that internally reflects the conceit of a novel written with a vital piece missing, though concomitant then with an inability to mention it, but it's still fun throughout, often hilarious, and a very rewarding book to have read. Philosophical, full of big plots and little, it's a difficult read but a worthwhile one. Oh yes!

This you should study, ask not why, 07 Nov 2008
This significant book, who's linguistically cunning author calls for no introduction, strains against a troublingly unjust handicap... in fact, two. It informs of a tall story, that of Anton Vowl, a similar champion of virtuoso wordplay who is lost to a churning, sorrowful world without warning, thus provoking a fatal inquiry amongst bosom companions and distant contacts both, all of whom follow suit in shrugging off this mortal coil by turns - but within this account of bodily vanishings lurks a vast conundrum of non-inclusion, a puzzling confrontation orbiting around a pivotal lack so mammoth, so voluminous in its span as to thwart plausibility, whilst still so small as to prohibit our noticing it at all.

Still, this sacrificial act, this abdication, this hamstringing is an affliction which it inflicts by will, a pain which it truly wants, and no word said (nor any action) can or should bring a mitigatory balm to this masochistic, if not outright sadistic, mutilation. In a word - this book is an avowal (thank you) that no trick of lingual manipulation is out of bounds for our national patois, nor that of its Gallic originator. In this it triumphs grandly, though that victory occurs at a total cost of simplicity of communication, vigorously slamming shut its highly-wrought doors upon any unlucky digits of cursory curiosity too dozy to pull away. But what bounty awaits stoical inquiry - in particular a work of brilliant rhyming skill, amongst a (now painfully shorn) handful of gracious nods to prior wordsmiths of no small acclaim.

On an opposing, still thumb-sporting hand, it is to an additional cross (born out of admiration, I will admit, but anyway) that I must turn my angry focus upon. On first sight of its striking bindings this book displays its own solitary flaw, imparting a critical hint as to what is at hand; and in all writings on this topic it is as if divulging A Void's cryptic crux is a vital goal, as if baring its soul without just sanction is to show apt approbation or, put simply, to do it honour. Sadly, to my mind this only subtracts from any summing of its multifariously loquacious parts, and not as its author originally did.

It is, probably, possibly, a foolish wish, an Utopian illusion that such a book as this could both flourish and still maintain its ambiguous shroud; for who could withstand this typographic storm, who would voluntarily swallow such an occasionally sour tasting pill without knowing why, what man or woman is willing to climb so high an obstruction as this, with no conscious motivation for attaining its final summit? How fitting, though, how chivalrous to abstain: to stand back from broadcasting all, from shouting on rooftops, from crowing with abandon; from cutting to, and out, its pounding corazón and draining off its blood; to simply say, "this you should study, ask not why".

In fact, I cannot bring my own musings to a conclusion in such a way as to risk committing a similarly criminal act on my part. What can I say to sum up my thoughts? Ah, I know - though in choosing my closing words I may unwittingly clarify, not mask. But I shall stop writing now with this, in summary of A Void:

Georges Perec's exemplary achievement - deliberate elementary absence, ever expressed, never revealed - comprehensively exceeds expectations. However, foreknowledge undermines these endeavours; excessively free reviewers threaten depreciating every newcomer's revelatory experience. Perec's perfectly perforated, entirely incomplete, pervasively evasive piece deserves better; mere readers likewise.

Awesome !, 02 Sep 2008
I read this book years ago, after it was mentioned in an editorial of a magazine I was reading. Totally intregued, I went straight out and bought it. Read it. Marvelled at it.
Perec has become one of my favourite authors since.
And to make it all the more perfect - he then wrote Three - a short story where the only vowel is E !! He had to use them up!
Read it - if only to be suitably awed.

An amusing floccinaucinihilipilification, 14 Aug 2008
Random thoughts on first coming into contact with this book:
1. Which imp is disposing of a particular mark throughout this folio?
2. What can such disposal do to this unassuming appraisal?
3. Which man, following an author in disposing of Anton Vowl, slipping a hint as to whodunnit in virtually all this book's paragraphs, would put his sign to such a work of translation? Gilb Adair? A triumph.

Which should work by way of illustration, amplifying your grasp of this paradox of a voluminous pratting about - a book, a fantasy of aristocracy and policing, which our author (originally GP, not GA) took a contract to construct without using a particular - shall I say - mark? 5 stars, nay, an infinity of stars for such a victory against customary linguistics!

Brilliant satire and hypnotic ennui, 12 Jun 2002
Two very different books - this is, after all, Perec, whose project was to write one of everything. Things was the novel which brought him to the world's attention, a satire on consumerism, ambition and self-satisfaction which is subtle and affecting.
The more striking book, though, is A Man Asleep. It is the story of a student who withdraws from the world, told in the second person - an extremely unusual literary device which, in Perec's hands, is incredibly effective. Everyone I know who has read this book has been stricken with near-clinical depression! The novel's hypnotic voice is irresistible.

Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

genius, 14 Apr 2004
The cleverest man who ever died, bit doesnt make you feel stupid- only more aware of the things and words around you. A great accompanyment to "A Void" and "Life..." and a reasonable introduction to Oulipo.

Question your teaspoons!, 23 Oct 2002
I'm a big fan of Mr Perec and other Oulipo writers, and I reckon this is a fine introduction to his range and vitality as a writer. I return to the different pieces again and again, they are thought-provoking and insightful by turns. Especially good are Think/classify, the title-piece and his thoughts on fashion. In these short works, his interest in penetrating the world we inhabit through the things around us often termed mundane is really refreshing. Sociology is made accessible here and distilled with literary and linguistic knowledge to make a quite unique mix.

For such a technical master, Perec also manages to move on an emotive level - Rue Vilin is a piece about periodic returns to the street where his ma lived before she was taken by the Nazis. Also, the analysis of his psycho analysis is revealing without ever saying too much.

Finally, the translations manage to keep the readability of the selections very well I thought.

One criticism is that there were not more pieces included, perhaps some more Oulipo related work might have been put in - there is not much of this translated into English, although it is maybe not the easiest of tasks to do well.

Thought-provoking if characteristically erratic collection, 25 Jan 2001
Originally commissioned by his architect friend, Species of Spaces is a meditation on the spaces which we occupy and the ways in which we order them. Forming the main section of this book, it is also one of its highlights: original, informed and often witty. It's a piece which takes a fresh look at what surrounds us, offering a refreshing perspective on how we live. The rest of the book is taken up with a collection of pieces ranging from the autobiographical to the surreal. Some of these pieces are extremely compelling pieces of storytelling, while others give you an insight into the oblique perspective of Perec. Occasionally, however, there is a weaker piece which, being a completist text, it is naturally hard to avoid. But this considered, as a whole the book is a special collection which should form part of any Perec fan's bookcase.

"E's are good" ...?, 14 Nov 2008
Okay, the temptation here is to write a lipogrammatical review, but to be honest - much as I enjoyed the examples below - there is probably a need for a few "straight" reviews as well, to let everyone know what an extraordinary book this is.

A novel of more than 300 pages without the letter "E" is already impressive just as an intellectual feat, in sheer Guinness-book-of-records, well-fancy-that terms. It's hard enough in French, but arguably even harder in English, so full marks to Gilbert Adair for his black-belt skills in translation. (Think about it a moment: no "the"; no "he", "she", "we" or "they".)

However, while this is always a witty book and occasionally an overtly funny one (Perec's E-free translations of Hamlet's soliloquy and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are hilarious), this is a serious book, full of Perec's usual combination of gentle melancholy with serious philosophical questions.

Anton Vowl and his chums, representing the six vowels (with "Y" included) and disappearing one by one in bizarre and mysterious circumstances, know something is missing from their lives but can't figure what; indeed generally fail to make sense of their world. What does the missing "e" represent? What is our own missing "e"?

And isn't it scary how quickly, reading this book, we get used to the absence of something as commonplace as the most frequently used letter in the alphabet? (A possible metaphor for Europe after the Holocaust, or the like?)

Like all Perec, "A Void" is serious fun, but ultimately decidedly unsettling. He certainly makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Georges Perec - A Void, 12 Nov 2008
Remarkable! Though it is a more an intellectual exercise than an intelligible work of fiction (though, of course it *is* an intelligible work of fiction, otherwise the exercise would render itself pointless), a Void is delightful and delightfully clever experience. It strains credibility, credulity, and sometimes, through its oft-necessarily torturous syntax and plotting that internally reflects the conceit of a novel written with a vital piece missing, though concomitant then with an inability to mention it, but it's still fun throughout, often hilarious, and a very rewarding book to have read. Philosophical, full of big plots and little, it's a difficult read but a worthwhile one. Oh yes!

This you should study, ask not why, 07 Nov 2008
This significant book, who's linguistically cunning author calls for no introduction, strains against a troublingly unjust handicap... in fact, two. It informs of a tall story, that of Anton Vowl, a similar champion of virtuoso wordplay who is lost to a churning, sorrowful world without warning, thus provoking a fatal inquiry amongst bosom companions and distant contacts both, all of whom follow suit in shrugging off this mortal coil by turns - but within this account of bodily vanishings lurks a vast conundrum of non-inclusion, a puzzling confrontation orbiting around a pivotal lack so mammoth, so voluminous in its span as to thwart plausibility, whilst still so small as to prohibit our noticing it at all.

Still, this sacrificial act, this abdication, this hamstringing is an affliction which it inflicts by will, a pain which it truly wants, and no word said (nor any action) can or should bring a mitigatory balm to this masochistic, if not outright sadistic, mutilation. In a word - this book is an avowal (thank you) that no trick of lingual manipulation is out of bounds for our national patois, nor that of its Gallic originator. In this it triumphs grandly, though that victory occurs at a total cost of simplicity of communication, vigorously slamming shut its highly-wrought doors upon any unlucky digits of cursory curiosity too dozy to pull away. But what bounty awaits stoical inquiry - in particular a work of brilliant rhyming skill, amongst a (now painfully shorn) handful of gracious nods to prior wordsmiths of no small acclaim.

On an opposing, still thumb-sporting hand, it is to an additional cross (born out of admiration, I will admit, but anyway) that I must turn my angry focus upon. On first sight of its striking bindings this book displays its own solitary flaw, imparting a critical hint as to what is at hand; and in all writings on this topic it is as if divulging A Void's cryptic crux is a vital goal, as if baring its soul without just sanction is to show apt approbation or, put simply, to do it honour. Sadly, to my mind this only subtracts from any summing of its multifariously loquacious parts, and not as its author originally did.

It is, probably, possibly, a foolish wish, an Utopian illusion that such a book as this could both flourish and still maintain its ambiguous shroud; for who could withstand this typographic storm, who would voluntarily swallow such an occasionally sour tasting pill without knowing why, what man or woman is willing to climb so high an obstruction as this, with no conscious motivation for attaining its final summit? How fitting, though, how chivalrous to abstain: to stand back from broadcasting all, from shouting on rooftops, from crowing with abandon; from cutting to, and out, its pounding corazón and draining off its blood; to simply say, "this you should study, ask not why".

In fact, I cannot bring my own musings to a conclusion in such a way as to risk committing a similarly criminal act on my part. What can I say to sum up my thoughts? Ah, I know - though in choosing my closing words I may unwittingly clarify, not mask. But I shall stop writing now with this, in summary of A Void:

Georges Perec's exemplary achievement - deliberate elementary absence, ever expressed, never revealed - comprehensively exceeds expectations. However, foreknowledge undermines these endeavours; excessively free reviewers threaten depreciating every newcomer's revelatory experience. Perec's perfectly perforated, entirely incomplete, pervasively evasive piece deserves better; mere readers likewise.

Awesome !, 02 Sep 2008
I read this book years ago, after it was mentioned in an editorial of a magazine I was reading. Totally intregued, I went straight out and bought it. Read it. Marvelled at it.
Perec has become one of my favourite authors since.
And to make it all the more perfect - he then wrote Three - a short story where the only vowel is E !! He had to use them up!
Read it - if only to be suitably awed.

An amusing floccinaucinihilipilification, 14 Aug 2008
Random thoughts on first coming into contact with this book:
1. Which imp is disposing of a particular mark throughout this folio?
2. What can such disposal do to this unassuming appraisal?
3. Which man, following an author in disposing of Anton Vowl, slipping a hint as to whodunnit in virtually all this book's paragraphs, would put his sign to such a work of translation? Gilb Adair? A triumph.

Which should work by way of illustration, amplifying your grasp of this paradox of a voluminous pratting about - a book, a fantasy of aristocracy and policing, which our author (originally GP, not GA) took a contract to construct without using a particular - shall I say - mark? 5 stars, nay, an infinity of stars for such a victory against customary linguistics!

Brilliant satire and hypnotic ennui, 12 Jun 2002
Two very different books - this is, after all, Perec, whose project was to write one of everything. Things was the novel which brought him to the world's attention, a satire on consumerism, ambition and self-satisfaction which is subtle and affecting.
The more striking book, though, is A Man Asleep. It is the story of a student who withdraws from the world, told in the second person - an extremely unusual literary device which, in Perec's hands, is incredibly effective. Everyone I know who has read this book has been stricken with near-clinical depression! The novel's hypnotic voice is irresistible.

The Joy of Deception, 28 Jun 2004
I will happily put my hand up and say The Gallery Portrait by George Perec (the third of these three) is the best short story I have ever read. It consists of a description of the history and content of a single painting, but to say any more would give it away. It's a wonderful introduction to what Perec can do when he's let loose and anyone who likes this will love Life: A User's Manual.

Also in this volume are Who's Bike with the Chrome Plated Handlebars....., in which every literary form and device is crammed into 20 short pages, and The Exeter Text, which is a lipogram in a, i, o and u.

It is a travesty that this book is out of print while the DaVinci code is a bestseller.

Perfect Perec, 28 Oct 2007
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.

Genius akin to madness., 02 Mar 2007
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.

"The ephemeral and the eternal", 03 Jan 2007
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.

Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...

All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.

In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.

Stunning in its complexity and warmth, 20 Feb 2004
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together.

A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.

genius, 14 Apr 2004
The cleverest man who ever died, bit doesnt make you feel stupid- only more aware of the things and words around you. A great accompanyment to "A Void" and "Life..." and a reasonable introduction to Oulipo.

Question your teaspoons!, 23 Oct 2002
I'm a big fan of Mr Perec and other Oulipo writers, and I reckon this is a fine introduction to his range and vitality as a writer. I return to the different pieces again and again, they are thought-provoking and insightful by turns. Especially good are Think/classify, the title-piece and his thoughts on fashion. In these short works, his interest in penetrating the world we inhabit through the things around us often termed mundane is really refreshing. Sociology is made accessible here and distilled with literary and linguistic knowledge to make a quite unique mix.

For such a technical master, Perec also manages to move on an emotive level - Rue Vilin is a piece about periodic returns to the street where his ma lived before she was taken by the Nazis. Also, the analysis of his psycho analysis is revealing without ever saying too much.

Finally, the translations manage to keep the readability of the selections very well I thought.

One criticism is that there were not more pieces included, perhaps some more Oulipo related work might have been put in - there is not much of this translated into English, although it is maybe not the easiest of tasks to do well.

Thought-provoking if characteristically erratic collection, 25 Jan 2001
Originally commissioned by his architect friend, Species of Spaces is a meditation on the spaces which we occupy and the ways in which we order them. Forming the main section of this book, it is also one of its highlights: original, informed and often witty. It's a piece which takes a fresh look at what surrounds us, offering a refreshing perspective on how we live. The rest of the book is taken up with a collection of pieces ranging from the autobiographical to the surreal. Some of these pieces are extremely compelling pieces of storytelling, while others give you an insight into the oblique perspective of Perec. Occasionally, however, there is a weaker piece which, being a completist text, it is naturally hard to avoid. But this considered, as a whole the book is a special collection which should form part of any Perec fan's bookcase.

"E's are good" ...?, 14 Nov 2008
Okay, the temptation here is to write a lipogrammatical review, but to be honest - much as I enjoyed the examples below - there is probably a need for a few "straight" reviews as well, to let everyone know what an extraordinary book this is.

A novel of more than 300 pages without the letter "E" is already impressive just as an intellectual feat, in sheer Guinness-book-of-records, well-fancy-that terms. It's hard enough in French, but arguably even harder in English, so full marks to Gilbert Adair for his black-belt skills in translation. (Think about it a moment: no "the"; no "he", "she", "we" or "they".)

However, while this is always a witty book and occasionally an overtly funny one (Perec's E-free translations of Hamlet's soliloquy and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are hilarious), this is a serious book, full of Perec's usual combination of gentle melancholy with serious philosophical questions.

Anton Vowl and his chums, representing the six vowels (with "Y" included) and disappearing one by one in bizarre and mysterious circumstances, know something is missing from their lives but can't figure what; indeed generally fail to make sense of their world. What does the missing "e" represent? What is our own missing "e"?

And isn't it scary how quickly, reading this book, we get used to the absence of something as commonplace as the most frequently used letter in the alphabet? (A possible metaphor for Europe after the Holocaust, or the like?)

Like all Perec, "A Void" is serious fun, but ultimately decidedly unsettling. He certainly makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Georges Perec - A Void, 12 Nov 2008
Remarkable! Though it is a more an intellectual exercise than an intelligible work of fiction (though, of course it *is* an intelligible work of fiction, otherwise the exercise would render itself pointless), a Void is delightful and delightfully clever experience. It strains credibility, credulity, and sometimes, through its oft-necessarily torturous syntax and plotting that internally reflects the conceit of a novel written with a vital piece missing, though concomitant then with an inability to mention it, but it's still fun throughout, often hilarious, and a very rewarding book to have read. Philosophical, full of big plots and little, it's a difficult read but a worthwhile one. Oh yes!

This you should study, ask not why, 07 Nov 2008
This significant book, who's linguistically cunning author calls for no introduction, strains against a troublingly unjust handicap... in fact, two. It informs of a tall story, that of Anton Vowl, a similar champion of virtuoso wordplay who is lost to a churning, sorrowful world without warning, thus provoking a fatal inquiry amongst bosom companions and distant contacts both, all of whom follow suit in shrugging off this mortal coil by turns - but within this account of bodily vanishings lurks a vast conundrum of non-inclusion, a puzzling confrontation orbiting around a pivotal lack so mammoth, so voluminous in its span as to thwart plausibility, whilst still so small as to prohibit our noticing it at all.

Still, this sacrificial act, this abdication, this hamstringing is an affliction which it inflicts by will, a pain which it truly wants, and no word said (nor any action) can or should bring a mitigatory balm to this masochistic, if not outright sadistic, mutilation. In a word - this book is an avowal (thank you) that no trick of lingual manipulation is out of bounds for our national patois, nor that of its Gallic originator. In this it triumphs grandly, though that victory occurs at a total cost of simplicity of communication, vigorously slamming shut its highly-wrought doors upon any unlucky digits of cursory curiosity too dozy to pull away. But what bounty awaits stoical inquiry - in particular a work of brilliant rhyming skill, amongst a (now painfully shorn) handful of gracious nods to prior wordsmiths of no small acclaim.

On an opposing, still thumb-sporting hand, it is to an additional cross (born out of admiration, I will admit, but anyway) that I must turn my angry focus upon. On first sight of its striking bindings this book displays its own solitary flaw, imparting a critical hint as to what is at hand; and in all writings on this topic it is as if divulging A Void's cryptic crux is a vital goal, as if baring its soul without just sanction is to show apt approbation or, put simply, to do it honour. Sadly, to my mind this only subtracts from any summing of its multifariously loquacious parts, and not as its author originally did.

It is, probably, possibly, a foolish wish, an Utopian illusion that such a book as this could both flourish and still maintain its ambiguous shroud; for who could withstand this typographic storm, who would voluntarily swallow such an occasionally sour tasting pill without knowing why, what man or woman is willing to climb so high an obstruction as this, with no conscious motivation for attaining its final summit? How fitting, though, how chivalrous to abstain: to stand back from broadcasting all, from shouting on rooftops, from crowing with abandon; from cutting to, and out, its pounding corazón and draining off its blood; to simply say, "this you should study, ask not why".

In fact, I cannot bring my own musings to a conclusion in such a way as to risk committing a similarly criminal act on my part. What can I say to sum up my thoughts? Ah, I know - though in choosing my closing words I may unwittingly clarify, not mask. But I shall stop writing now with this, in summary of A Void:

Georges Perec's exemplary achievement - deliberate elementary absence, ever expressed, never revealed - comprehensively exceeds expectations. However, foreknowledge undermines these endeavours; excessively free reviewers threaten depreciating every newcomer's revelatory experience. Perec's perfectly perforated, entirely incomplete, pervasively evasive piece deserves better; mere readers likewise.

Awesome !, 02 Sep 2008
I read this book years ago, after it was mentioned in an editorial of a magazine I was reading. Totally intregued, I went straight out and bought it. Read it. Marvelled at it.
Perec has become one of my favourite authors since.
And to make it all the more perfect - he then wrote Three - a short story where the only vowel is E !! He had to use them up!
Read it - if only to be suitably awed.

An amusing floccinaucinihilipilification, 14 Aug 2008
Random thoughts on first coming into contact with this book:
1. Which imp is disposing of a particular mark throughout this folio?
2. What can such disposal do to this unassuming appraisal?
3. Which man, following an author in disposing of Anton Vowl, slipping a hint as to whodunnit in virtually all this book's paragraphs, would put his sign to such a work of translation? Gilb Adair? A triumph.

Which should work by way of illustration, amplifying your grasp of this paradox of a voluminous pratting about - a book, a fantasy of aristocracy and policing, which our author (originally GP, not GA) took a contract to construct without using a particular - shall I say - mark? 5 stars, nay, an infinity of stars for such a victory against customary linguistics!

Brilliant satire and hypnotic ennui, 12 Jun 2002
Two very different books - this is, after all, Perec, whose project was to write one of everything. Things was the novel which brought him to the world's attention, a satire on consumerism, ambition and self-satisfaction which is subtle and affecting.
The more striking book, though, is A Man Asleep. It is the story of a student who withdraws from the world, told in the second person - an extremely unusual literary device which, in Perec's hands, is incredibly effective. Everyone I know who has read this book has been stricken with near-clinical depression! The novel's hypnotic voice is irresistible.

The Joy of Deception, 28 Jun 2004
I will happily put my hand up and say The Gallery Portrait by George Perec (the third of these three) is the best short story I have ever read. It consists of a description of the history and content of a single painting, but to say any more would give it away. It's a wonderful introduction to what Perec can do when he's let loose and anyone who likes this will love Life: A User's Manual.

Also in this volume are Who's Bike with the Chrome Plated Handlebars....., in which every literary form and device is crammed into 20 short pages, and The Exeter Text, which is a lipogram in a, i, o and u.

It is a travesty that this book is out of print while the DaVinci code is a bestseller.

this book is in french, 03 Jul 1999
if you don't read french don't buy this book. A repressing is available from amazon.com

"53 Days"