books @ cc.

by Marjane Satrapi (2001)

An autobiographical comic/graphic novel/bande dessinée, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi as a girl growing up in Iran around the revolution & wartime, then abroad by herself. Chronologically told, with each chapter focusing loosely on specific events, the memoir tells us more about everyday occurrences in the life of a daughter of a (relatively) priviliged, “liberal” Iranian family than about general Iranian life (the family lives comfortably even during troubled times, and Satrapi spent a good deal of her youth abroad in Vienna) or history. The illustrations are simple, basic figures, and Satrapi effectively and stylistically uses stark black and white with no greytones.

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.