it was learned that Cécile Perec had been transported by cattle truck to Auschwitz, where she was taken with other Jews directly to the gas chamber. Without mother or father, Georges became the ward of David Bienenfeld.

In 1945, after the end of World War II, Georges returned to Paris from Vercors, a mountainous region in southeastern France, and settled with David and Esther Bien-enfeld and their children, Bianca and Lili, in the family’s comfortable apartment on Rue de l’Assomption in the sixteenth arrondissement. In the early years, Georges profoundly missed the affection of his biological parents. Nevertheless, he developed strong ties with Bianca, for whom he felt great brotherly affection. His relationship with his uncle David was more problematic; arriving in Paris at the age of nine, and not having had a father figure for six years, Georges was hardly nurtured by Bienenfeld’s rigidity and lack of warmth.

From 1948 to 1951, Perec attended boarding school at the Collège Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire at Etampes, about fifty kilometers south of Paris. During these years, Perec visited Israel during summer vacations and was introduced to classical music, modern painting, the works of the German writer Thomas Mann, surrealism, and the formally innovative modern novel of France, called the new novel. By the age of sixteen, Perec had been to England, Israel, Austria, and Switzerland and had traveled across France from the Atlantic coast to the Alps. He was fond of cycling, detective fiction, jazz, and cinema. At this time, he also read the works of the French existentialist writer Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and of Honoré de Balzac, whose enormous corpus of works, La Comédie humaine (1829-1848; The Human Comedy, 1885-1893), paints a minutely detailed picture of nineteenth century France.

By the age of eighteen, Perec had decided to be a writer. This decision had probably been taken during his last two years of secondary education. In Je suis né (1990; I was born), he claims not to have understood this decision and, indeed, questions the very nature of a writer’s activity.

Perec did extremely well in his examinations for the baccalauréat and won the school prize for philosophy in 1954. Since the young man had not carried on his Greek studies, he was unable to enter the finest of France’s grandes écoles, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. As a consequence, he attempted to gain admission to the slightly less prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud by entering the preparatory class, hypokhâgne, at Lycée Henri-IV in the Latin Quarter of Paris. At the end of the 1955 school year, he was informed by school authorities that his time at Henri-IV was over. Immediately following this, he enrolled for a degree in history at the Sorbonne, where he spent several lackluster months before terminating his academic career. His failure to succeed at Henri-IV meant that he would not be admitted to agrande école or be a candidate for the agrégation, a rigorous set of national examinations that often served at that time to support the writing life of academics and to grant admission to the French establishment’s intelligentsia.

In early 1955, Perec began publishing literary reviews through the encouragement and publishing connections of Jean Duvignaud, his philosophy teacher at Etampes, in the Nouvelle NRF, the new version of the monthly La Nouvelle Revue Française, founded long before by the French writer André Gide. During his student years in Paris, the foundations of Perec’s literary culture, mainly French, were laid. His interests did not limit themselves exclusively to French literature, though, since he also read the Irish poet and novelist James Joyce and the American novelist John Dos Passos.

Begun in the summer of 1955, when the war against Communist insurgents in Guatemala was at its height, and finished before mid-February, 1956, “Les Errants” (the wanderers) was Perec’s first unpublished novel. Set in Guatemala, it recounts the death of four itinerant jazz musicians. Never submitted to a publisher, the manuscript is nevertheless present in La Vie mode d’emploi (1978;Life: A User’s Manual, 1987) and was the subject of a lecture Perec gave in Australia in 1981, as an example of how not to write.

In 1960, Perec married Paulette Petras, a student at the Sorbonne. In 1961, Perec secured a position as a scientific archivist, which he would keep for nearly two decades, in a laboratory for medical neurophysiology. Among his many tasks, Perec was expected to type documents of various kinds. Here the writer took over the archivist’s domain. Perec would often systematically modify colleagues’ scientific reports by inserting puns, spoonerisms, and misspellings. His games with English involved inserting French words apparently at random and applying spelling distortions to written English that represented the sound of atrocious French accents. Scientific pseudo-English was attacked with zeal, and he delighted in using incremental indentations to compose diamond-shaped, E-shaped, and triangular-shaped texts. Eventually, Perec received a tenured position as archivist and, despite his unorthodox typing results, retained his position in the laboratory.

When Perec published Things, it was admired for its realism of situation, for its story of poverty bound up with the image of wealth, for its combined sociological and aesthetic dimensions. Bellos believes it represents in one sense the last chapter of Perec’s autobiography. With few exceptions, what he wrote after Things draws on material from earlier periods of his life.

In Things there is no psychological probing into the lives of the young couple Jérôme and Sylvie. A sharp focus on the things desired by the couple unveils the emptiness of their lives, from which passion of any kind is absent. Consequently, the novel creates a profound sense of melancholy that invades the reader’s sensibility.

In 1967, Perec was co-opted as a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; workshop for potential literature), founded in 1960 by a group of writers and mathematicians who wished to fashion new tools for writing and to refurbish old and forgotten ones. Perec’s adoption by OuLiPo was significant, since it demonstrated that the group recognized him as one who could endorse and develop the objective of literary innovation.

La Disparition (1969; the disappearance)—an eloquent example of such an attempt, for it is written without the use of e—is about a man who disappears and whose friends, trying to locate him, also vanish one by one. Perec wished to see if e-less French could invent its own story and vindicate the potential not only of that constraint but also of the very principle of constraint. Although La Disparition was not well received, news of it spread by word of mouth among the literary avant-garde rather than by critical notice.

By the end of 1969, Georges and Paulette had separated. Settling eventually into an apartment above her husband’s in Rue Linné on the Left Bank, Paulette remained Madame Perec in law and was a central member of the writer’s family of friends. In 1975, Perec began a relationship with Catherine Binet, a woman eight years his junior who was a film writer and director. Binet proved a faithful friend, to whom Perec would read the drafts of Life: A User’s Manual, until his death seven years later.

Life was written in less than eighteen months following a meticulously prepared plan that had taken years to establish. The work is interwoven with a seemingly endless array of different types of fiction: fairy tales, an adventure narrative, a family drama, a detective story, and a dream sequence, among others. Many nonnarrative forms of writing are incorporated, including a dictionary entry, a newspaper résumé, and an equipment catalog. Perec’s talent as a writer of pastiche is clearly evident, as are his skills in multiplying narrative and linguistic styles. For this work, his last unique contribution to modern French literature before his death in Paris from cancer in 1982, he was awarded the 1978 Prix Médicis.

David Bellos has re-created with acute precision and a wealth of documentation the literary career of Perec and, to a lesser degree, has produced a psychological portrait of the man. That Perec was able to sustain a prolific writing career despite a lack of financial stability is testimony to his commitment to his deeply felt desire to write and, while doing so, to create a type of all-encompassing literature that could transcend stultifying ideologies. Georges Perec: A Life in Words is a rich chronicle of the inimitable position Perec has come to occupy in modern French literature.

Sources for Further Study

Australian Book Review. February, 1994, p. 46.

Choice. XXXI, May, 1994, p. 1440.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 12, 1993, p. 3.

New Statesman and Society. VI, December 3, 1993, p. 38.

The New York Review of Books. XLI, November 3, 1994, p. 47.

The New Yorker. LXX, March 7, 1994, p. 99.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, October 11, 1993, p. 75.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction. XIV, Spring, 1994, p. 235.

The Times Literary Supplement. December 3, 1993, p. 3.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, January 9, 1994, p. 5.