Georges Perec
The structural recipe requires opening with "the single most-cited work in the fact sheet," but the FACTS list contains no named works. Following the EVIDENCE LOCK rule, the biography proceeds from the strongest available concrete facts.
Georges Perec was born on 7 March 1936 in the 19th arrondissement of Paris and was educated at the Lycée Claude-Bernard. He worked as a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, film screenwriter, and crossword creator, while also holding positions as a librarian and documentalist. Writing in French throughout his life, he moved across an unusually broad range of forms, bringing to each the same engagement with language and structure that characterized his practice as a whole.
His career as a novelist brought him two of France's notable literary distinctions: the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Médicis. These recognitions placed him among the writers whom French literary culture chose to honor formally, and they arrived within a working life that encompassed documentary work and criticism alongside fiction, poetry, and the construction of crosswords — forms that share, in different registers, a concern with arrangement and constraint.
Perec died on 3 March 1982 in Ivry-sur-Seine, four days before what would have been his forty-sixth birthday. The range of roles he occupied — documentalist, librarian, screenwriter, crossword creator, novelist — remained, until his death, the concrete shape of a career conducted across multiple modes of written and structured thought.
Quotes by Georges Perec
Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission.
Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone.
Above all, they had the cinema. And this was probably the only area where they had learned everything from their own sensibilities.
I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book: an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more especially, and in addition, of having in the end found kin again.
A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say.
People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their realplans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world – such people will always be unhappy.
To want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep. To let yourself be carried along by the crowds, and the streets. To follow the gutters, the fences, the water’s edge. To walk the length of the embankments, to hug the walls. To waste your time. To have no projects, to feel no impatience. To be without desire, or resentment, or revolt.
I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.
