So Much for the Granta
Couple of Perec-related links:
First up, Daniel Levin Becker, last seen authoring Many Subtle Channels and extolling the greatness of Harry Mathews has translated Georges Perec’s dream journal as La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams for Melville House Press. I wonder how it will compare to his fiction. More at the Melville House blog.
And then, that other Perec translator, David Bellos, writes about Perec’s masterwork, Life A User’s Manual.
It also dawned on me that it wasn’t really a French novel at all: it was a universal novel that just happened to be written in French. And that could easily be changed!
Here, at last, was a post-Sartre storybook capable of bringing French fiction back from the brink of extinction to which Alain Robbe-Grillet had driven it. I began to wonder if I could give Perec the global audience his novel seemed designed to reach. With luck, the help of a dear friend, a courageous publisher and the most exhilarating hard work I have ever done, La Vie mode d’emploi became Life A User’s Manual within a few years. It changed my life. And it changed the field of the novel too.
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More from Conversational Reading:
- Publishing Georges Perec (Godine is publishing a new, corrected edition of Life A User's Manual and the first-ever English edition of Perec's essays collected in Thoughts of Sorts....
- Machine by Georges Perec Rev’d at Complete Review Michael Orthofer reviews "The Machine," a radio play written by Geroges Perec and published for the first time in English in the recent all-Perec issue...
- Special Georges Perec RCF Available The new Review of Contemporary Fiction just landed on my doorstep. It’s an entire issue devoted to Georges Perec, and if that doesn’t get you...
- Perec's Unfinished Books Even wonder what Georges Perec would have written if he hadn’t died of cancer at 45? At Words Without Borders Laird Hunt gives some idea...
- The State of Georges Simenon It’s become quite a revival. Over the last few years the New York Review of Books Classics Press have been steadily issuing these remarkable books...
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“Here, at last, was a post-Sartre storybook capable of bringing French fiction back from the brink of extinction to which Alain Robbe-Grillet had driven it.” What’s that about? Robbe-Grillet single-handedly destroying an entire literature? How? By creating novels people were free to love, ignore, or loathe as they saw fit? By working with Jerome Lindon to publish things they thought worthy and reject what they thought wasn’t? Who knew Minuit was the only publisher of French books! Or by not getting Perec published at Minuit? A grudge then?