May 20, 1996 'An eccentric, madly ambitious scheme to display life all at once. The product of a hectically ingenious intelligence, like James Joyce's' - Victoria Glendinning. The Times. 'Amazing, moving and lovable'. New Statesman. 'The finest novel to appear in French since Beckett's trilogy'. Times Literary Supplement. 'Very funny and very sad. Nov 09, 2017 What's the best way to enter a changing and uncertain workforce? In this short documentary, Rob Montz provides advice from experts, workers, and his own experience. Let us know what you think.
Georges Perec (born George Peretz) (French: [peÊÉk, pÉÊÉk];[1] 7 March 1936 â 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.[2]
Early life[edit]
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from untreated gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and his mother perished in the NaziHolocaust, probably in Auschwitz sometime after 1943. Perec was taken into the care of his paternal aunt and uncle in 1942, and in 1945 he was formally adopted by them.
Career[edit]
Perec started writing reviews and essays for La Nouvelle Revue française and Les Lettres nouvelles [fr], prominent literary publications, while studying history and sociology at the Sorbonne. In 1958/59 Perec served in the army as a paratrooper (XVIIIe Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes), and married Paulette Petras after being discharged. They spent one year (1960/1961) in Sfax, Tunisia, where Paulette worked as a teacher; these experiences are reflected in Things: A Story of the Sixties, which is about a young Parisian couple who also spend a year in Sfax.
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In 1961 Perec began working at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory in the unit's research library funded by the CNRS and attached to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine as an archivist, a low-paid position which he retained until 1978. A few reviewers have noted that the daily handling of records and varied data may have had an influence on his literary style. In any case, Perec's work on the reassessment of the academic journals under subscription was influenced by a talk about the handling of scientific information given by Eugene Garfield in Paris and he was introduced to Marshall McLuhan by Jean Duvignaud. Perec's other major influence was the Oulipo, which he joined in 1967, meeting Raymond Queneau, among others. Perec dedicated his masterpiece, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life a User's Manual) to Queneau, who died before it was published. Autotune 8 free download mac.
Perec began working on a series of radio plays with his translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz [de] in the late 60s; less than a decade later, he was making films. His first work, based on his novel Un Homme qui dort, was co-directed by Bernard Queysanne [fr], and won him the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974. Perec also created crossword puzzles for Le Point from 1976 on.
La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) brought Perec some financial and critical successâit won the Prix Médicisâand allowed him to turn to writing full-time. He was a writer in residence at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1981, during which time he worked on 53 Jours (53 Days), which he would not finish. Shortly after his return from Australia, his health deteriorated. A heavy smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine, only forty-five years old; his ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Work[edit]![]()
Many of Perec's novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
Perec's first novel Les Choses: Une Histoire des Années Soixante (Things: A Story of the Sixties) (1965) was awarded the Prix Renaudot.
Perec's most famous novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life a User's Manual) was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as 'novels', in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. La Vie mode d'emploi is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity. The 99 chapters of his 600-page novel move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of the building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants. At the end, it is revealed that the whole book actually takes place in a single moment, with a final twist that is an example of 'cosmic irony'. It was translated into English by David Bellos in 1987.
Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter 'e'. It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter 'e' is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both 'e' and a vowel other than 'e').
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a remote island country called 'W', at first appears to be a utopian society modeled on the Olympic ideal, but is gradually exposed as a horrifying, totalitarian prison much like a concentration camp. The second narrative is a description of Perec's own childhood during and after World War II. Both narratives converge towards the end, highlighting the common theme of the Holocaust.
'Cantatrix sopranica L. Scientific Papers' is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the 'yelling reaction' provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. '(Karybb & Szyla, 1973)'.[3]
David Bellos, who has translated several of Perec's works, wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
The Association Georges Perec has extensive archives on the author in Paris.[4]
In 1992 Perec's initially rejected novel Gaspard pas mort (Gaspard not dead), which was believed to be lost, was found by David Bellos amongst papers in the house of Perec's friend Alain Guérin [fr]. The novel was reworked several times and retitled Le Condottière [fr][5] and published in 2012; its English translation by Bellos followed in 2014 as Portrait of a Man after the 1475 painting of that name by Antonello da Messina.[6] The initial title borrows the name Gaspard from the Paul Verlaine poem 'Gaspar Hauser Chante'[7] and characters named 'Gaspard' appear in both W, or the Memory of Childhood and Life a User's Manual, while in 'MICRO-TRADUCTIONS, 15 variations discrètes sur un poème connu' he creatively re-writes the Verlaine poem 15 times.
Honours[edit]
Asteroidno. 2817, discovered in 1982, was named after Perec. In 1994, a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris was named after him, rue Georges-Perec [fr]. The French postal service issued a stamp in 2002 in his honour; it was designed by Marc Taraskoff and engraved by Pierre Albuisson. For his work, Perec won the Prix Renaudot in 1965, the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974, the Prix Médicis in 1978. He was featured as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday.[8]
Works[edit]![]() Books[edit]
The most complete bibliography of Perec's works is Bernard Magné's Tentative d'inventaire pas trop approximatif des écrits de Georges Perec (Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1993).
Films[edit]
References[edit]
Further reading[edit]
Biographies
Criticism
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georges_Perec&oldid=915255041'
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Untitled[edit]
Just a quick note on the section entitled 'The Novel'. Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246: 'Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile.' I also agree that much more could be done on this entry. While it's obviously pretty hard to explain a lot of this stuff, I really don't think we've managed to capture yet what is so great about the novel. I might have a go at some point. We'll have to see if I can find the time. James
Expansion[edit]
Just a quick note on the section entitled 'The Novel.' Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246 in Bellos' translation: 'Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile.' For what it's worth, I also agree that this entry needs an update. While it's obviously very hard to do justice to a novel like this here, I think we can do better. I'll see if I can find the time to have a go at some point. James
Doesn't look like anyone has been working intently on this page in awhile. I'd like to expand it some more, some of the sections are quite good, but some are rather short and perhaps a little too brief for those who have not actually read the novel. I also think the page coul possibly use to be reorganized a little bit -- perhaps find some way to integrate the 'novel' section with the 'elements' section? Any suggestions?JKillah 15:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
Capitalization police please note: 'La Vie mode d'emploi' is exactly how the title appears in both of my copies. :-) -- user:Tarquin
Proper names of things like books need to have the capitalization the the author of the book placed on his/her book. This is a noted exception to the capitalization rule. However, my searches indicate that the title is sometimes expressed with a lowercase 'v', as in, La vie mode d'emploi. But since the capitalization is correct, in this case, I think a redirect is in order from the lowercase term to the properly capitalized term. Thank you for noting the correct capitalization here - It would bave been difficult for me to find this out by trying to translate those search results. --maveric149
I don't want to trespass too much on matters about which others know more than I, but .. Am I right in thinking that the construction of the apartment block is in fact a graeco-latin square of order 10? The interesting thing here is that Leonhard Euler had believed that no such array existed but it was constructed by computer search in 1959. Cutler 11:18, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Life A User's Manual French Door
Today I added a section on the word puzzles contained in the novel, along with some specifics on the Chapter 51 puzzle with a quote from David Bellos he shared with me via email.
There's no ':' in the title of the English translation.. âPreceding unsigned comment added by 62.136.113.236 (talk) 19:01, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
Agreed- the full title in English, reflecting the French original, is 'Life A User's Manual' but I can't work out how to Edit the title of this page (can it be done?). âPreceding unsigned comment added by 137.191.228.106 (talk) 08:26, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Three questions[edit]
1. Why is the cross section on p. 501 of the English translation drawn incorrectly? It looks like a 10x9, not 10x10 square (shouldn't the rooms of Hutting, Cinoc, Réol, and Berger drawn wider?)
2. In chapter 51 the list of 179 stories has the word 'ego' embedded in them â why is that? Incidentally, the translator's skill on display there is simply astonishing.
3. The mathematics on p. 7 has errors in it and is also a typographic disaster zone. Is the French original similarly bad? Seems like Perec would be the type of man to make sure the thing is as accurate as possible. In the English version everything looks wrong: the spacing, the typeface, the misunderstood math symbols, missing parentheses, etc. etc.JanBielawski (talk) 06:39, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Ewart7034 18:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC) An issue with the article[edit]Life A User's Manual French Press
The passage La Vie mode d'emploi is an immensely complex and rich work; a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas and literary and historical allusions seems in breach of WP:EDITORIAL and WP:NPOV.Autarch (talk) 12:42, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
Does anyone know the answer?[edit]
On page 415 (English translation) we are given four riddles with no answers:
(1) Who was John Leland's friend? (Thomas Wyatt; this answer can be found in the book's index!)
(2) Who was threatened by a railway-share? (The Snark in The Hunting of the Snark) (3) Who was Sheraton? (Thomas Sheraton) (4) Who shaved the old man's beard?
Does anyone know the answer to this fourth riddle? 91.105.31.153 (talk) 00:34, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Constraints[edit]
The section entitled constraints isn't at all well explained - the part about the lists and how they match up is very confused. It either needs rewording, or an illustraive diagram needs to be added. Office for mac download problems. Best video enhancement software for mac. Also references for this section? â Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.200.144.132 (talk) 08:51, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
The missing colon in 'Life (:) A User's Manual'[edit]
The image shown on the main page has the colon, implicitly. The line break is the colon.
If there were really no colon there, then the title would have been written:
The British Library has 2 records for this book:
I see ^^^^^ punctuation here. Don't you?
Restore the deleted colon. Varlaam (talk) 04:34, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
David Bellos' biography of Perec renders the title colonless, as do the translations of Perec's writings in the Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Perec's friend and collaborator Harry Mathews. It seems fair to assume Perec's intended title is colonless. [Anonymous User, 21/02/2017]
Requested move 3 August 2018[edit]Picador
The result of the move request was: Moved. No objections and seems fair enough. It's found with a colon in some places, e.g. Amazon, and although many other sources don't have a colon, but equally they don't have a lower-case 'a' either, so the current title isn't really any good. â Amakuru (talk) 18:06, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
Life a User's Manual â Life: A User's Manual â Per MOS:TITLES and the typical way this is rendered in English (exact styling varies: Life: A User's Manual, Life: a User's Manual, Life, a User's Manual, Life â A User's Manual, etc.), but it's clearly treated as a subtitle. There are also occurrence of just Life a User's Manual, but they're not even faintly close to a consistent style employed across the majority of RS, so we have no reason to depart from MOS:TITLES; there is no WP:IAR case to make here. The current page title is ungrammatical and confusing. âââ¯SMcCandlishâ¢â?â 16:56, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
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