Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec review – his long-lost first novel

Rejected by publishers and then lost for 50 years, this tale of an art forger whose attempt to go beyond imitation ends in murder is awkward but fascinating

Steven Poole
Thursday 11 December 2014

Amaster forger conceives of a fantastic ambition: to go beyond the mere imitation of old painters, and instead “to create an authentic masterwork of the past”. That is the high concept behind the recently rediscovered first novel by the much-loved French experimental writer Georges Perec. Written when he was 24, it was never published in his lifetime, having been rejected by le tout Paris. Is it an authentic masterwork, or was the world not much the poorer after Perec’s typescript was accidentally thrown away in the wrong cardboard box?

The novel opens as the protagonist, forger Gaspard Winckler, is dragging downstairs the body of a man he has just murdered. The reader is at once plunged into Gaspard’s fetid and paranoid thoughts, as he attempts to escape from the studio where he has been holed up for months, at work on what was supposed to be his crowning achievement.Soon the narration begins to jump around chronologically, as Perec draws slow-motion tableaux that portray other states of psychic tension: Gaspard rooted to the spot at a party, Gaspard on an aeroplane thinking about a disappointed girlfriend, Gaspard embracing solitude because of his social anxiety (“he had felt splashed by the existence of other people”), and so on. We learn the sad fate of his teacher in forgery, Jérôme. In a rare flash of the comedy that would become much more common in Perec’s work, we are told that Jérôme “had had a truly distinguished career. One da Vinci, seven Van Goghs, two Rubens, two Goyas, two Rembrandts and two Bellinis.”

The solution of the whydunit is revealed as a non-solution. “Why did you kill Madera?” Gaspard asks himself at one point. “No motives. He was fat and alive, he puffed like a sealion, he was ugly.” In his excellent introduction, the translator David Bellos mentions Sartre’s notion of authenticity in the context of this novel’s discussion of art fakery, but Perec was plainly also thinking of both Sartre and Camus in their capacity as writers of existentialist fiction, in which a gratuitous act may be reinterpreted as a defiant gesture of liberty. “A first autonomous action,” Gaspard later calls the murder he committed, “the first act of freedom, the first evidence of a conscious mind.”

At length, Gaspard escapes from the murder location. The novel’s talky, retrospective second half sees him holed up with a friend and obsessively going over the details of his life and strange artistic ambition, which he realises at last was a failure. (Hence the appearance of a character also named Gaspard Winckler in Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, who has concocted a surprising artistic “revenge”.) What narrative suspense remains comes from some superbly engaging discussions of both an actual painting – the 1475 Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina – and the making of a fake painting, as Gaspard tries to paint a new Antonello that would have been worthy of Antonello himself. The action here is deliciously slow and pedantic, as we reach the conceptual heart of the fiction: “I ended up picking a rather dull ochre, with a swarthy skin, black hair, very dark brown eyes, thick lips that were a shade darker, a lie-de-vin tunic, a dark red background, slightly lighter on the right hand side.” But what Gaspard ends up with, he realises to his horror, is the self-portrait of an empty man.

In the end, it is most tempting to read this fascinating but awkward novel (the publisher Gallimard’s rejection for “excessive clumsiness and chatter” does not seem overly harsh) as an allegory of Perec’s own anxieties of influence, as he attempted to become a novelist. “I had to create a new language, but I was not free,” Gaspard remembers at one point, thinking about his doomed work. “The grammar and the syntax were given, but the words had no meaning; I did not have the right to use them. That was what I had to invent, a new vocabulary, a new set of signs [...] It had to be identifiable at first glance, but nonetheless it had to be different [...] It was a tough game to play.”

A tough game, indeed. And perhaps Perec recognised that Gaspard’s failure to create a credible portrait of a man was also his own. By the novel’s end, the artist-hero is instead looking to the future, promising himself that from now on he will devote all his energies to the creation of something with “palpable lucidity”, something that reflects a “sensibility in full bloom”. And that, after all, is what Georges Perec went on to do.

THE GUARDIAN