Georges Perec

 

The best of Georges Perec

La Disparition (1969)
Les Revenentes (1972)
La Vie mode d'emploi (1978)

Joe Dunthorne
Monday 19 January 2019

Here's Perec's best: three texts penned yet fewer letters selected. Every sentence remembers. A lipogram is a text without a given letter. Writing more than a paragraph with this restriction - and still making sense - can be tough. Astonishingly, in La Disparition Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e", the most common vowel in the French language. It is a playful detective story where characters try to solve puzzles and find answers that - often because of the language constraint - are just out of reach. Central to the novel (A Void in Gilbert Adair's virtuoso translation) is the idea of disappearance and, implicitly, the Holocaust.

Perec was born the only son of Polish-Jewish parents who both died in the second world war: his father fighting for the French army, and his mother at Auschwitz. He was born Georges Peretz but his parents had changed his name when he was young. When the Nazis came through the Alpine town where he had taken refuge with relatives, the name Perec, being plausibly Breton, did not attract suspicion. Thus, his survival as a child was linked with linguistic coincidence and wordplay. In La Disparition, Perec is not able to say his own name or use the words "mére", "pére" or "parents".

Les Revenentes (translated by Ian Monk as The Exeter Text) is a univocalism, a text which only uses one vowel, in this case "e". The novella tells the story of a jewel robbery that takes place during a sexual orgy. Perec resists the seriousness of tone that one expects of a Holocaust novel. It's comedy as bravery - an attempt to make laughter from unutterable grief.

His masterpiece is La Vie mode d'emploi (brilliantly translated by David Bellos as Life: A User's Manual). Nine years in the making, it is terrifically entertaining and fizzes with riddles, conundrums and jigsaws, telling the story, room by room, of an entire French apartment block. Life appears as something we wish could be controllable, solvable - but completion is denied: there's always a piece missing.

 Joe Dunthorne's Submarine is published by Penguin

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