A Life in Words: A Life in Words : a Biography - Hardcover

Bellos, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879239808 ISBN 13: 9780879239800

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc, 1993

Synopsis

Comprehensive biography of celebrated French avant-garde author. xxx, 802 pages, illustrations.

About this title

Review:

Georges Perec was one of the finest writers of the 20th century and yet his work remains relatively obscure. He is probably best known for Life: A User's Manual a book he dedicated to his fellow avant- gardist Raymond Queneau (who, along with Harry Matthews, Italo Calvino, Perec and others, was a member of OuLiPo-- an important group of experimental writers and mathematicians). He wrote the wonderful lipogram A Void a book in which the letter "e" never appears and the world's longest palindrome (in the form of a two-and-a- half page story.) He is seen by many as a true literary genius. Bellos traces the sadness behind Perec's prodigious wordplay, his confused and tragic lineage (including his mother's demise in the death camps), his entry on to the literary scene with the anti-materialist Things, his Jewish (non-)identity. Without Bellos's translations Perec would probably have remained unknown outside of France. Without this readable, compelling, exhaustive biography his often autobiographical, highly structured fiction would be far less approachable. Georges Perec: a Life in Words is a fitting testimony to a writer we should all know better. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

"Immense, buoyant, utterly revealing... Has achieved an overwhelmingly human portrait, as vivid as it is complex, not only of Perec but of the mechanisms, intrigues, passions and comedies of Paris intellectual life in the sixties and seventies" (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times)

"A vast and heartening biography that gives unfashionable weight to the subject's playfulness as a writer, for all his deep difficulties as a man" (Hugo Barnacle, Independent)

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0879239808
• ISBN 13: 9780879239800
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 832