Georges Perec

Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport.

In these writings, Georges Perec constructs a bold new critical discourse-one that remains faithful to leftist imperatives such as history, class consciousness, and revolution-while maintaining his independence from the dominant voices of the Left, whose vision had long dominated the Left's understanding of literature and politics in postwar France. Perec's essays traverse a wide cultural terrain, from the radical experimentation of Free Jazz to the speculative landscapes of Science Fiction, and beyond. Together, they reveal a restless intellect and an enduring love for the divergent cultural materials that would go on to shape Perec's own literary work. Written against a backdrop of political unrest, domestic division, and global uncertainty, The General Line offers a window into a critical mind grappling with the contradictions of its time. Rob Halpern's incisive introduction situates these early political essays within both the turbulent historical moment and the evolving trajectory of Perec's extraordinary body of work.

A mind-bending mysterious comedy from the author of Life A User's Manual. A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of displays Georges Perec's virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . . A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, The New York Times called A Void, "a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped."

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise-neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining-is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what 'computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry'. This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.

"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."--Boston Globe Structured around a single moment in time -- 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 -- Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User's Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.

Ranskalaisen Georges Perecin esikoisteos Tavarat (1965) oli heti menestys ja sai arvostetun Renaudot-palkinnon. Ensi kertaa sitten Zolan Naisten paratiisin (1883), romaanin aiheena on tavaroiden haluaminen ja ostaminen, johon lehdet ja mainokset ja näyteikkunat yllyttävät. Tavaroiden päähenkilöt Sylvie ja Jerome haaskaavat elämänsä haaveksimiseen. Pian Tavaroiden ilmestymisen jälkeen, vuonna 1968, puhkesivat Ranskassa suuret mielenosoitukset ennen kaikkea kulutusyhteiskuntaa vastaan, mutta tavaroiden tuottaminenhan vain kiihtyi, seurauksin, jotka nykyään tunnetaan. Suomentaja Leena Rantanen on kirjoittanut myös jälkisanat. Pariisissa elänyt Georges Perec (1936-1982) on viime vuosisadan omaperäisimpiä kirjailijoita. Hän kuului Oulipo-ryhmään, joka harrasti kaikenlaisia kirjallisia kepposia. Perecin jokainen teos on erilainen: luokittelua, sanaryöppyä, peliä, mutta ei koskaan psykologista romaania. Hän laati myös viikoittain ristisanaruudukon Le Point -lehteen. Hänen koko tuotantonsa kumpuaa tyhjyyden tunteesta: isä kuoli toisessa maailmansodassa, äiti ja monet sukulaiset Auschwitzin keskitysleirillä. Pereciltä on suomennettu aiemmin viisi teosta. Leena Rantanen on asunut kolmekymmentäviisi vuotta Pariisissa, kirjoittanut parikymmentä omaa teosta ja saanut kaksi valtionpalkintoa. Hän on suomentanut italiasta ja ranskasta mm. Pirandelloa, Buzzatia, Voltairea - ja kirjoittanut kuvataiteesta ja kirjallisuudesta useisiin suomalaisiin lehtiin.

Förlorad roman för första gången i svensk översättningVärldens främste konstförfalskare, Gaspard Winckler, mördar sin uppdragsgivare, Anatole Madera. Varför? Gaspard har ägnat flera månader åt att skapa en kopia av Kondottiären, den berömda 1400-talsmålningen av Antonello da Messina som hänger på Louvren. Vad händer nu? Vad sökte Gaspard när han blev konstförfalskare? Och kommer förfalskaren någonsin att kunna mäta sig med renässansmästaren? Kondottiären publicerades trettio år efter Georges Perecs död. Han ansåg det vara sitt »första lyckade romanförsök«, men manuset hamnade på villovägar under en flytt 1966 och återfanns inte förrän många år senare. Romanen publicerades först 2012 och presenteras här för första gången på svenska, i översättning och med ett efterord av Fredrik Rönnbäck. GEORGES PEREC [1936-1982] är den konceptuella litteraturens franske mästare, författare till romanklassiker som Livet en bruksanvisning, Försvinna och W eller minnet av barndomen.» Georges Perec är en av världens mest väsentliga litterära personligheter.« Italo Calvino

La collection Conna tre une oeuvre vous offre la possibilit de tout savoir de W ou le Souvenir d'enfance de Georges Perec gr ce une fiche de lecture aussi compl te que d taill e. La r daction, claire et accessible, a t confi e un sp cialiste universitaire. Cette fiche de lecture r pond une charte qualit mise en place par une quipe d'enseignants. Ce livre contient la biographie de Georges Perec, la pr sentation de W ou le Souvenir d'enfance, le r sum d taill , les raisons du succ s, les th mes principaux et l' tude du mouvement litt raire de l'auteur

Venez d couvrir Les Choses de Georges Perec gr ce une analyse litt raire de r f rence crite par un sp cialiste universitaire, cette fiche de lecture est recommand e par de nombreux enseignants. Cet ouvrage contient la biographie de l' crivain, le r sum d taill , le mouvement litt raire, le contexte de publication de l'oeuvre et l'analyse compl te. Retrouvez tous nos titres sur: www.fichedelecture.fr.