Notre Dame London: Fischer Hall Library

An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris /

Perec, Georges, 1936-1982.

An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris / Georges Perec ; translated by Marc Lowenthal. - ix, 55 pages ; 18 cm. - Imagining science ; 1 . - Imagining science ; 1. .

Originally published: Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien. Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1975.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 55).

"One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin."--P. [4] of cover.

9780984115525 (pbk.) 0984115528 (pbk.)

2012371749


Perec, Georges, 1936-1982.


Paris (France)--Drama.

PQ2676.E67 / T4613 2010

848/.91403