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Tentative D'épuisement D'un Lieu Parisien (1975)

by Georges Perec(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

2267019590 (ISBN13: 9782267019599)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Christian Bourgois

review 1: Firmly entrenched in his oulipo methodologies, this is not his masterpiece of Life a User's Manual or A Void nor was it meant to be ��however, what it is is a not so quiet meditation on the experience of Paris and most deliciously important, a look inside the process of Perec. If you are a fan, I recommend it highly and the Wakefield Press edition is like a gift to your hands and eyes. Well done!Pick it up at your local independent bookseller. Mine is Elliott Bay Books!Philip Swanstrom Shaw
review 2: This is an excellent illustration of a problem with purely descriptive, unvoiced, "unoriginal" writing: the more it attempts to be "unoriginal" in Marjorie Perloff's sense, the more meaning is infused. Perec's project is to describe the "infraordinary"... more: everything about this square in Paris that is not recorded in the history and tourism books, and, by implication, in novels. He spends a lot of his weekend noting what people are eating or carrying, and he spends a lot of the first day noting when different buses go by. But even the first two pages are dense with implied narratives, and it is those narratives that give the project interest, not the lists of "infraordinary" events.[return][return]Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective, or neutral, standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the opening session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. This would be a limited and plausible game, like a child's game of naming letters on signs. But by the bottom of the first page -- six short paragraphs from the beginning -- he writes:[return][return]�Ground: packed gravel and sand.[return][return]This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and it's clearly also an indication of where he will stop. He won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) are similar announcements of the limits of his project:[return][return]�Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...[return]�Asphalt[return]�Trees (leafy, many yellowing)[return][return]These are indications of refusals. Flaubert, for example, would have been expected to write at length on those things. Then, two more paragraphs down:[return][return]�Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)[return][return]This is self-reflexive, about what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):[return][return]�Human beings[return][return]Now the voice is ironic. In the space of 1 1/2 very short pages, the tone is rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. then comes a heading:[return][return]Trajectories[return]The 96 goes to Montparnasse station[return]The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret[return]The 70 goes to Placd du Dr Hayen...[return][return]This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games. [return][return]This is just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. All this has to raise the question of whether there is a larger plan, a game that comprehends these partial games.[return][return]My conclusion is: the book is interesting for the continuously renewed interest in the kinds of literary and non-literary voices and references the writing conjures, not for the descriptive attempt or for any notion of the infraordinary. The very project of the infraordinary is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that are floating and assembling in his mind. less

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