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“... upon a time, before the Channel Tunnel was built, there were two contemporary French novelists. Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45, and nobody in England who was not a French specialist had ever heard of him. With Philippe Sollers it was different. Editor of the avant-garde theoretical journal Tel Quel, and associate of literary and ...”

“... Like Hoyle and Stephen Potter, Georges Perec was a devotee of indoor games. La Vie Mode d’Emploi (1978), a title combining lifemanship, gamesmanship and one-upmanship, was the monumental creation of an author whose other productions included a treatise on Go (the Japanese board-game) and a weekly crossword for the magazine Le Point ...”

“... It should make the business of writing not pleasanter but harder. Harder or, if you think like Georges Perec, easier. Perec has to have been the most talented and entertaining player of word-games in the long history of Homo ludens, and he gave as his reason for taking to them so whole-heartedly that had he not been ...”

“... and Tlooth (1966); he was trying hard to find a publisher for the third. He had been befriended by Georges Perec and become a member of the Oulipo, the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, whose monthly meetings to discuss mathematical or combinatorial writerly inventions kept him going but whose fierce criticism could be discouraging. He went to ...”

“... These are the first of Georges Perec’s wonderful and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first and most popular novel, Les Choses (1965), which still sells twenty thousand copies a year ...”

“... to forget, if we can stay with palindromes for a moment, the over-the-top example provided by Georges Perec for the 1973 anthology, which runs to more than five thousand characters, all the way from ‘Trace l’inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule. Le brut repentir, cet écrit né Perec’, to, a ...”

“... to elicit genuine emotion, and the most indebted to Le Tellier’s Oulipian forebear, Georges Perec, whose Life: A User’s Manual is a masterpiece of smart and unashamedly emotional character sketches intertwined by clever conceptual trickery. (‘Why walk in Perec’s shadow?’ Victor scolds himself at ...”

“... that one. Harry Mathews, a friend of Brainard’s, explained the concept to his fellow Oulipian Georges Perec, who composed his own Je me souviens (dedicated to Brainard), which was published in 1978, and the genre took off in France too. When Perec died five years later Mathews commemorated him with a text entitled ...”

“... of expansion, however, but by their self-imposed laws of constraint. The best known of these are Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition (1969), composed without once using the letter e, and his Les Revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels except e. Over the years OuLiPians have developed or recovered all manner of demanding ...”

“... commercial conventions were perfected in the US – finds its most cerebral innovators abroad: Georges Simenon (Belgium), Leonardo Sciascia (Italy), Bernhard Schlink (Germany). What must be its mandarin masterpiece was written in French in 1969: Georges Perec’s La Disparition is a lipogram, from the Greek ...”

“... unfinished novels into short stories. He wrote a story for the OuLiPo, the Paris group to which Georges Perec and other avant-garde writers belonged, but was quite happy to have it published in Playboy instead. If we connect the idea of ‘piling stories upon stories’ with a nostalgia for innocent, childhood reading experiences it may be because the ...”

“... Barnes a ‘Modernist’ or a ‘Post-Modernist’ writer? Some might want to call Beckett or Georges Perec ‘Modernist’, some might want to call them ‘Post-Modernist’, and the disagreement would not seem to be fatal. The concept ‘Modernist’ originated in connection with art, and if you do not demand too much from the term, it can be ...”

“... that. Only a very few occasions allowed John to lower his guard. The death in Auschwitz of Georges Perec’s mother elicits a hint of sentimentality, but time spent in the Gulag is no excuse for sloppy thinking and, as John puts it, Andrei Sakharov’s discussion of Derrida isn’t ‘guaranteed to be totally coherent by his courage in resisting ...”

“... a képi bleu swiftly follows. But, my novel apart, they write on this matter better in France, Georges Perec being perhaps the most recent of the great literary pinball players. The protagonist of Perec’s A Man Asleep speaks for me: ‘You hug the machines for nights on end, feverishly, angrily. You ...”

“... Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has Georges Bataille dismissing Sade’s new-found admirers as ‘con artists’). Of the women writers for whom admission to the canon is demanded, one, George Sand, has surely never been dropped from it, but another, the late 18th-century novelist, Isabelle de ...”