Perfect Perec
|
|
A Paris apartment block becomes a virtual chessboard in a book of games and puzzles. A multitude of stories amasses around the objects and facts that fill each room and each individual connected with the building. And at its core, there is the story of Bartlebooth, the wealthy gentleman who decides on an arbitrary course of existence that will take a lifetime to achieve, and his puzzle-maker, Gaspard Winckler, who ultimately frustrates his plan. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that its form so fully mirrors its content. Just as Perec bases the journey from room to room on the knight's tour round the chessboard, landing once and once only on each square, so he exerts his freedom from these self-imposed structures and rules by making a false move. And these are not the only rules that Perec used to write the novel. This adherence to arbitrary structures has its mirror in Bartlebooth's essentially pointless, yet rigorously constructed, life; the exertion of freedom, in Winckler's final revenge. Like 100 Years Of Solitude, its many, many threads come together at the last. Like Invisible Cities, it is the things that are least mappable (the flight of the swallows) that ultimately have the most meaning.
|
|
Genius akin to madness.
|
|
I managed, showing great fortitude and patience, to read half of this book. However life is too short to waste any more time on what is undoubtedly a well-written but ultimately a novel(?) that is tedious beyond measure. There are a few interesting or amusing anecdotes but also a hundred or more lists of for the most part mundane objects of the kind you will see if you look around the room you are now sitting in. So much care and effort must have gone into this mountain (hill?) of a book but all that has come out of it is a rather dull mouse.
|
|
|
"The ephemeral and the eternal"
|
Georges Perec's wonderful title perhaps requires an opening warning that this is an experimental novel rather than a New Age self-help guide ... but a novel unlike any that I've ever read before. He takes a Paris apartment block on a single day (23rd June 1975), and moves round individual rooms in the various flats in an order which is apparently determined by a well-known conundrum in chess (how to get round all 64 squares of a chess board using consecutive Knight's Moves) for a total of 99 fairly short chapters. In each room, he gives us a detailed inventory of the contents - including any people who may be present and what they are up to - usually followed by a digression relating some of the occupants' Back Story, but not infrequently leading on to a digression on something much more tangential (the life story of a sixteenth-century explorer, say, whose biography happens to be in the room). By the end of the book, Perec emerges as a sort of unlikely Sheherazade, having given the reader some short but unforgettable tales (which he helpfully lists as an Appendix with page numbers!). He has also, more memorably, given us a remarkably complete picture of the life of the apartment lived all-at-once, and how the various occupants interact with each other, linked via the central tale of English billionaire eccentric Percival Bartlebooth and his jigsaws.
Bartlebooth, cursed with inexhaustable reserves of time and money, effectively decides to turn his own life into a work of art, by touring the world for twenty years painting 500 watercolours of seaports, which are then turned into jigsaws by one of the apartment's other occupants, Gaspard Winckler. Bartlebooth will then attempt to re-assemble the (increasingly difficult) jigsaws over the next twenty years, with the completed puzzles being glued back together and washed clean, leaving a blank sheet of canvas again. Bartlebooth's whole enterprise is pointless other than the considerable challenge of actually carrying out this "self-erasing work of art". But his plans are threatened firstly by an interfering art critic, and secondly by Gaspard Winckler himself, who has his own agenda...
All of this probably makes the book itself sound like a bit of a pointless puzzle, or at least like something dry and cerebral. Nothing could be further from the case: Perec's dazzling patchwork quilt - or jigsaw - of tales ranges from the humorous (Remi Rorschach, who always comes up with a brilliant idea or business plan about a month too late) through the cautionary (the sad case of Dr Dinteville's research project) to the downright tragic (the Altamonts); as well as some that can only be described as wilfully bizarre (domino-playing hamsters??). While Perec makes the whole exercise an entertaining game for the reader, in accordance with the principles of the Oulipo group of writers of which he was the "star striker" in the 70s (I won't attempt the French version of the name lest I embarrass myself, but "Oulipo" is an acronym for something like "Workshop for Potential Literature" - they seek to unite literature with seemingly unconnected disciplines such as mathematics and science), his novel is cumulatively both very moving and tinged with his usual gentle melancholy.
In the end, this is a book of "dead letters" - secrets never told; plans never carried out. Perec puts a short superscription to his final chapter saying that he (or Bartlebooth?) is "simultaneously seeking the ephemeral and the eternal". But although this is often a rather sad book, and although he certainly brings home the fleeting nature of human existence and the transience of all our best-laid plans, this isn't a nihilistic work: Perec has endless sympathy for his characters' human frailties, and I found myself becoming very fond even of characters who initially appeared hard to like once their Back Stories had been revealed more fully. Perhaps this is one of the things he was trying to say: he can't give us any grand "Meaning of Life"; we're stuck with making the most of the small change of random events and human friendships that life throws our way.
|
|
|
Stunning in its complexity and warmth
|
|
A long, complex novel, ostensibly about a Parisian apartment building and the history of the people who've lived there over many generations - and of the complex ties between them. The other metaphor Perec keeps coming back to is that of the jigsaw puzzle. Everyone fits into the complex overall framework of life; all sorts of strange fragmentary shapes - births, deaths, lives, loves, objects lost and found, hopes fulfilled and shattered - figure in the interlocking tales that wander across time and space. Shining through the complex structure of the book is Perec's warmth and humanity - his belief that love and hope and honesty are what bind us together. A wonderful, memorable read. Treat yourself.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada