The digital editions of Le Seuil publish for free on Friday Premisesa collection of 133 texts in which the French author explores Paris over six years, between descriptions and memories.
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 of them are based on on-the-spot observations (“real”), the other half written from memory, drawing on past events (“memory”).
Read alsoGeorges Perec: “Notes on what I’m looking for”
“I think that we will see there all at once the aging of places, the aging of my writing, the aging of my memories”, explained Perec in a letter to his publisher, 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.
Read alsoThree Reasons to Reread Things, by Georges Perec
To read Premises, no need to pay 29 euros in bookstores: the Seuil makes it available online for free and in full. For example, by clicking on text 82, Jussieu, real 4, we discover that Perec came on May 30, 1972 to a cafe near the Faculty of Science. He describes ” spray-paint inscriptions which have been made illegible not by scraping 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.
Read alsoTwitter invites us to put our “e” in the basket: tribute to Georges Perec
But other entry points are possible. For example, if the reader uses the index, he will be able to discover the letter K, as “Kronenbourg beers”text 25 which talks about the Place d’Italie in January 1970. Perec transcribed an advertisement: “I love my wife – She buys the – Kronenbourg – by 6”. The reader will also be able to immerse himself in the maps of the neighborhoods described: by going to Junot, the name of an avenue on the hillsides of the Montmartre hill, the reader chooses, for example, text 107. The author takes us into “the Chavranskis’ apartment”inhabited by a man who read novels shortly after their publication (press services sold to second-hand booksellers)» and his wife who “made good pastries”. One more click and we learn that Perec writes tapestries, “probably by mistake”.
Read alsoThe very first novel by Georges Perec has been found
Transcribing and ordering all of these sometimes fragile fragments took four years. George Perec “wrote in a wide variety of media: sometimes very well, other times it was difficult to decipher, with abbreviations”explains to theAFP the project coordinator, the writer’s second cousin and heir, 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 imaginations run wild.”.
Read alsoGeorges Perec revived
Georges Perec died at age 45 in March 1982 of lung cancer. And 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 the 19th or in the 20th”. But he keeps coming back to it. The final text, six years later, raises an inscription which he reads there: “work = torture”.