Name: Georges Perec
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)

David Bellos

Professor of French Studies David Bellos

George Perec is the author of "Life, A User's Manual". This aims to provide a comprehensive biography including a full survey of Perec's varied oeuvre, portraying an anguished, comical and ordinary man.

A Life in Words : a Biography

Georges Perec

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - IGilbert Adair, Sunday Times/I 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 Ioeuvre -/I 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 IA Void /I(1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "p re", "mere", and even "George Perec". His career made an auspicious start with IThings: A Story of the Sixties/I (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 Litt rature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with ILife A User's Manual/I (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, I53 Days/I, incomplete. "Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's Ioeuvre /Iand to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - IJonathan Romney, Literary Review/I

A Life in Words

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Qui est Georges Perec ? C'est pour répondre à cette quiestion que le traducteur anglais de La Vie mode d'emploi s'est mis en quête de celui qui est, pour beaucoup, l'ecrivain le novateur de sa génération

Georges Perec A Life in Words : a Biography

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