Species of Spaces and Other Pieces George Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age and Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is edited and translated from the French with an introduction by John Sturroc
George Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age, and Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is edited and translated from the French with an introduction by John Sturrock in Penguin Classics.Georges Perec, author of Life A User s Manual, was one of the most surprising and enjoyable of all modern French writers The pieces in this volume showGeorge Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age, and Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is edited and translated from the French with an introduction by John Sturrock in Penguin Classics.Georges Perec, author of Life A User s Manual, was one of the most surprising and enjoyable of all modern French writers The pieces in this volume show him to be at times playful, serious at other, but writing always with the lightest of touches He had the keenest of eyes for the infra ordinary , the things we do every day eating, sleeping, working and the places we do them in without giving them a moment s thought But behind the lightness and humour, there is also the sadness of a French Jewish boy who lost his parents in the Second World War and found comfort in the material world around him, and above all in writing.This volume contains a selection of Georges Perec s non fiction works, along with a charming short story, The Winter Journey It includes notes and an introduction describing Perec s life and career.Georges Perec 1936 1982 was born in Paris, the son of Polish Jews After his father was killed in the Army, and his mother deported to Auschwitz where she later died, Perec was adopted by his aunt and uncle Working for most of his life as an archivist, Perec was one of the most important post war French novelists He is best remembered as the author of Life, A User s Manual and T
-
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Best Download || [Georges Perec John Sturrock]
314
Georges Perec John Sturrock
Georges Perec was a highly regarded French novelist, filmmaker and essayist He was a member of the Oulipo group Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.Born in a working class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla Schulewicz Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz Perec s first novel, Les Choses Things A Story of the Sixties was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.In 1978, Perec won the prix M dicis for Life A User s Manual French title, La Vie mode d emploi , possibly his best known work The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight s tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.Cantatrix Sopranica L is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the yelling reaction provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes All the references in the paper are multi lingual puns and jokes, e.g Karybb et Scyla, 1973.Perec is also noted for his constrained writing his 300 page novel La disparition 1969 is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter e It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void 1994 The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War Since the name Georges Perec is full of e s, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author s own disappearance.His novella Les revenentes 1972 is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter e is the only vowel used This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far those containing both e and a vowel other than e.W ou le souvenir d enfance, W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975 is a semi autobiographical work which is hard to classify Two alternating narratives make up the volume one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called W , patterned partly on life in a concentration camp and the second, descriptions of childhood Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.A heavy smoker throughout his life, Perec was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981 and he died the following year in Ivry sur Seine at only forty five years old His ashes are held at the columbarium of the P re Lachaise Cemetery.David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec Georges Perec A Life in Words, which won the Acad mie Goncourt s bourse for biography in 1994.