Pretzel

Mark Ford

• W or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos
  Collins Harvill, 176 pp, £10.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 00 271116 8
• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos
  Collins Harvill, 581 pp, £4.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 00 271999 1

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. Les Choses describes, with a sociological exactitude justified in the novel’s concluding quotation from Marx, the motivations and disappointments of an utterly ordinary middle-class couple in a consumerist culture. Sylvie and Jérôme are both public opinion analysts, as indeed was Perec at the time: they emerge as a kind of generically rootless Parisian couple of the Sixties, whose experiences and emotions are such that no one of that generation could help but identify with them. The book ties in neatly with, indeed was partly inspired by, Barthes’s theories on the language of publicity, which were appearing around the same time; its precision and syntactical ingenuity aspire to Flaubert, a major figure in Perec’s pantheon of favourite authors.