books @ cc.

Things: A Story of the ‘60
A Man Asleep
by Georges Perec (1965)

Containing Perec’s two-sides-of-the-same-coin novellas, both Things and A Man Asleep tell the stories of opposing youthful, spiralling indulgences in futile escape from life.

by Georges Perec (1969)

Born out of a self-imposed formalist grid of lipogram, A Void is essentially a parody of thriller and noir fiction, loaded with plots and subplots, pursuits, vengeance and grim conclusions, amazingly engrossing and well-written despite the missing ‘e’ letter throughout the whole novel.

by Georges Perec (1975)

A book of two alternating texts, one (written in italics) an imaginary adventure story, “an arbitrary but careful reconstruction of a childhood fantasy about a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal”; the other consisting of autobiographic fragments of wartime childhood “made up of scattered oddments, gaps, lapses, doubts, guesses and meagre anecdotes.”

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time the moment the protagonist (if he may be called so) Bartlebooth, dies. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints, resulting in an encyclopaedic work that is not just fascinating in its richness and masterful construction, but also beautiful, ordinary, bizarre, moving, and heart-wrenching.