Book description
"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's
Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times
Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994
George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European
writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile
and innovative writer of his generation.
David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the
first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre -
explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man,
who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The
French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all
of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend
France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel
A Void (1969) - written without using the letter
"e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words
"père", "mere", and even "George Perec".
His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the
Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an
idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the
intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. He belonged to
the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically
inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and
Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A
User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted
Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties
after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53
Days, incomplete.
"Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most
wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand
the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan
Romney, Literary Review
David Bellos is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and
Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication
at Princeton University. He is well known for his many translations and
for his biographies
Georges Perec: A Life in Words
and
Jacques Tati
. David Bellos was awarded the first Man Booker International
Translator's Prize in 2005 for his translations of Ismail Kadare's
novels.
