(Paris) An unpublished work by Georges Perec, Premisesappears Friday, increased by all the things which Internet allows, 40 years after the death of this novelist with the infinite imagination.
Posted yesterday at 10:22
Imposing volume that this work of the author of Disappearancepublished by Le Seuil: 612 pages, around a hundred color illustrations, 1.3 kg.
Premises is, however, unfinished. The ambitious project consisted of describing 24 places in his hometown, Paris, twice a month, for 12 years. That is 288 texts at the end.
Half is written from on-the-spot observations (“real”), the other half written from memory, based on events from the past (“memory”).
“I think that we will see there all at once the aging of the places, the aging of my writing, the aging of my memories”, explained Perec in a letter to his editor, Maurice Nadeau.
The writer starts in January 1969, expecting to finish in December 1980. He stays there until September 1975, which gives 133 texts, never published.
Free online
To read Premisesno need to pay 29 euros ($39) in bookstores: Le Seuil makes it available online for free and in full.
For example, by clicking on text 82, Jussieu, real 4we discover that Perec came on May 30, 1972 to a cafe near the Faculty of Science.
He describes ‘spray inscriptions which have been made illegible not by scratching them off or blackening them, but by destroying the intelligibility of each sign’. They are, he thinks, slogans painted on the walls after the death of the Maoist militant Pierre Overney, three months before.
Other entrance doors are possible.
By the index: at K for “Bières Kronenbourg”, the reader is referred to the text 25, place d’Italie in January 1970. Perec transcribed an advertisement: “I love my wife — She buys the — Kronenbourg — by 6 “.
By maps of the neighborhoods described: going to Junot, the name of an avenue on the hillsides of the Montmartre hill, the reader chooses for example text 107. The author leads us into “the Chavranski apartment”, inhabited by a man who read novels “shortly after their publication (press services peddled from second-hand booksellers)” and his wife who “baked good pastries”. One more click and we learn that Perec wrote tapestries, “probably by mistake”.
Let the imagination run wild
Transcribing and ordering all of these sometimes fragile fragments took four years.
Georges Perec “wrote on a wide variety of media: sometimes very well, other times it was difficult to decipher, with abbreviations”, explains to AFP the project coordinator, the little cousin and beneficiary of the writer, Sylvia Richardson.
The choice of free is commercially risky, she admits. “The idea is to open Georges up to many more readers than with a paying site. Le Seuil was convinced. I am grateful to them for making this bet,” adds this mathematician.
Where to start your navigation in Premises ? According to Sylvia Richardson, “It’s really personal. I recommend starting with a place where you have your own memories. I would like people to use it to let their own imagination run wild”.
Georges Perec died at age 45 in March 1982 of lung cancer.
In text 15, in August 1969, he admits that he does not know in which arrondissement the street of his childhood is located, in Belleville: “I don’t even know if rue Vilin is in 19and or in the 20and “. But he keeps coming back to it. The final text, six years later, raises an inscription which he reads there: “work = torture”.