Scope and Contents This biography of Georges Perec (1936-1982), novelist, poet, verbal gamesman, and master puzzler, whom Italo Calvino called, 'so singular a literary personality that he bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else,' is very lucidly presented. The biographer, David Bellos, also the English translator of Perec's books, has written such an interesting book that it almost reads like a fictional account of Perec's life. It is extremely well researched and documented. Examples of Perec's typewriter art, which he did mostly while working as a technician in a Neurophysiology Laboratory in Paris are printed on pages 260 and 690. Alexander Laurence wrote the following book review printed on the Internet 1999.We're all familiar with the term "slacker" and characteristics of the twenty-nothings who populate Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X. These are all attempts to capture a vibrant youth culture that adds to the present time. But what if I were to tell you that the French writer,...

Scope and Contents Originally published in French in 1978, this novel is considered to be an outstanding example of twentieth century fiction in the tradition of Canterbury Tales and Ulysses. It is composed of a seies of stories that occur at the same time in an apartment building in the 17th arrondisement of Paris. Fictional but meaningful, the people and events are described in humorous and specific detail. The book is constructed like a puzzle and contains an index and a chronology.WikipedIa: Life A User's Manual (the original title is La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, though Perec himself preferred to avoid labels and his only long term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle.La...

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The book consists of two novels. Things deals with a young French lower middle class couple in the post-WWII era who are marketing researchers. They want to be acquire possessions but do not have the necessary job skills or work ethnic to become wealthy. A Man Asleep is an existensionlist story about a nameless person that is written entirely in the second voice. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Amazon.com: 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. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This novel contains two distinct alternating biographies: the first is an allegorical story of W, a bizarre, mythical island civilization, symbolizing the Holocaust. It is printed in italics. The second text is Perec's memories of his childhood in Paris. Perec writes in his introduction that the two stories "are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though neither could exist on its own, as though it was only their coming together, the distant light they cast on each other, that could make apparent what is never quite said in one,never quite said in the other, but said only in their fragile overlapping." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.