I have been carrying this 700 page door-stop size book from Vermont to Cambridge and back again for several years, and finally, inspired by our stay in Paris last month, I actually began to read it there, and several weeks later, I finished it this morning

How to describe Perecs, this book, and Oulipo??? Perhaps best to start with Oulipo, an acronym of the French phrase “workshop of potential literature”. Begun in 1960 by a group of French writers and mathematicians, it was founded to generate new ideas for writing through  the use of constraints.  For example, Perec’s book ‘The Void’ was written as a lipogram, i.e. without a single letter  ‘e’, while his book ‘The Exeter Test’ eliminated all vowels except for ‘e’s.  Rising to the constraint challenge, both books are readable, make sense, and the uninitiated reader is completely unaware of the constraint.  My friend, Richard, in Nevada City, CA will love the constraint of Pilish, a method of writing wherein one matches the length of words (or amount of words in a sentence) to the digits of pi. Oulipo’s membership is limited to around 20 members, new members being invited only when a current member dies. The only American member is Daniel Levin Becker whose 2012 book “Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature” provided a valuable history and explanation of Oulipo.

Perec is a fascinating character.  The child of Polish Jews who had emigrated to Paris in 1923, his father died in WWII fighting for France, and his mother was murdered in Auschwitz.  Perec was adopted by relatives in 1945 and went on to graduate from the Sorbonne. He worked for 17 years as an archivist at the Neurophysiological Research Library in Paris until he devoted himself to writing radio programs, movies, and finally his novels. “Life: A User’s Manual”  brought him notice, awards,  and financial security but he had little time to enjoy them, dying at age 42 from lung cancer in 1982.  A 2019 New Yorker article about Perec described his work this way: “Even if Georges Perec had not written a novel without the letter “E”—“La disparition,” later rendered into “E”-less English as “A Void”—he would still be one of the most unusual writers of the twentieth century. Among his works are a treatise on the board game Go, a radio play about a machine that analyzes poetry, an autobiography cast in the form of a novel about a city of athletes, an approximately twelve-hundred-word palindrome, a crypto-Marxist anatomy of consumerist Paris, a scrupulously researched history of a wholly fictional painting, a deeply eccentric bucket list (“buy a number of domestic appliances” and “travel by submarine” are among the entries), a memoir composed of four hundred and eighty stand-alone sentences that all begin “I remember,” a novella in which the only vowel used is “E,” a lyric study of Ellis Island, and, from 1976 until his death from cancer, in 1982, a weekly crossword puzzle for the newspaper Le Point. It would be hard to disagree with Italo Calvino that Perec “bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else.” 

In this book, Perec used the Oulipo-generated constraint of a ‘story-making machine’ based on a specific mathematical constraint applied to the game of chess to write 99 chapters about the residents of an apartment building in Paris.  The book locates the building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, a fictitious address, but given his description of the neighboring streets, I was easily able to determine that it was only blocks from where we were staying. The Wikipedia entry for Perec describes the novel as “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.”  The chess challenge called the Knight’s Pattern involves  moving a knight around the board so as to touch every square on the board without landing on the same one twice.  That constraint must be how the chapters are arranged when located on the cross-sectional diagram of the building provided on page 569, but I couldn’t figure that out.

Not many novels have an eight page chronology of the birth and deaths and major life events of every character mentioned in the book, as well as a 64 page index, as well as a list of the 107 “Tales” that comprise much of the novel.  These tales begin with Perec’s description of the residents of one of the apartments and might start with a character in a painting on the wall, or an association with an object on a table, or with a random observation of the character in question.  The reader often finds himself racing down some vague and confusing worm hole about a “hamster who had been trained to play dominos” or an “acrobat who refused to get off his trapeze” or one of the other 107 tales that relate only distantly to the resident and his/her apartment, what the New Yorker reviewer referred to as ‘off kilter quotidian’.

The book is both infuriating and incredibly fascinating, alternately snooze-able (as he lists the 179 “characters, with their stories, their pasts, their legends” in the chapter about the longest lived apartment dweller, Valene, and his painting of the whole building) and totally enthralling. The latter would apply to Percival Bartlebooth, an Englishman living in rooms on the fourth floor.  Bartlebooth was a wealthy 30-something when he embarked on a conceptual art project that I just loved.  Having taken art lessons with the afore-mentioned Valene and having a fondness for jigsaw puzzles, he decided to embark on a trip around the world with his man servant Smautpf, stopping at a seaside location every two weeks to paint a watercolor of the scene.  He mailed these watercolors back to the apartment building to Gaspard Winckler who lived on the seventh floor and who applied the watercolor to a wooden board and then cut it into 750 pieces to create a nearly impossible jig saw puzzle.  The puzzle was then delivered to Bartlebooth in a specially designed box made by another resident of the building.  After Bartlebooth finished solving the jigsaw puzzle (a process that sometimes took him the full two weeks!), the puzzle was then treated with a special chemical invented by Morellet who lived on the top floor of the building to separate the reconstructed  watercolor from the wood.  The watercolor was then sent by Bartlebooth back to someone at the original site of that painting who, provided with a special solvent, treated the watercolor to remove all paint.  The blank white sheet was then sent back to Bartlebooth.  This exercise was carried out 500 times over a period of 20 years!!!!

Bartlebooth’s story and conceptual art project forms a vague core to the novel, but a similarly weird, complex, and often irrational story is told about every one of the building’s 26 current residents and 18 former residents.  Lists and detailed descriptions of the furniture, paintings, books and other contents of the apartment spill over into pages and pages.  The writing is brilliant though often without evident purpose.

As you can tell, I was and remain quite overwhelmed by this literary edifice.  Not for everyone, but Perec is definitely a fascinating writer worth getting to know.