Georges Perec

Georges Perec (Paris, 1936 - Ivry-sur-Seine, 1982) was one of the most distinctive writers in French literature of the second half of the twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, screenwriter and author of word games, he wrote in French and was a member of the Oulipo group from 1967 until his death. His work is best understood through his lifelong interest in formal constraints as a starting point for writing, and through his commitment to never repeating an idea from one book to the next. Today he is considered a cult author rather than a writer with mass readership, although his books have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Perec was born into a working-class district of Paris, the only son of a couple of Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War, in 1940, and his mother was killed in the Holocaust, probably at Auschwitz. After the war he was raised by relatives who formally adopted him in 1945, and he grew up in Paris and in Étampes, where he read and wrote constantly and became convinced that he would be a writer. He enrolled at the Sorbonne to study sociology, although he left his degrees unfinished, and he published his first reviews in leading literary journals. After his military service as a paratrooper he married Paulette Pétras, and the couple spent a year in Sfax, Tunisia, an experience that inspired his first novel, Things (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot.

For years he worked as an archivist in a neurophysiology laboratory, a poorly paid job that he balanced with journalism. In the Oulipo, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, he found a community suited to his games with anagrams, lipograms and puzzles. His style mixes experimentation with lists, catalogues and attempts at classification, and his texts are often tinged with melancholy. Absence, loss and identity run through his work, frequently approached through wordplay and, in W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975), through the memory of the war and the Holocaust.

His masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual (1978), is a mosaic of interlinked stories set in a Parisian apartment block, built on an intricate plan of constraints, and it won the Prix Médicis. That success allowed him to devote himself fully to writing. He also worked in film, radio and crosswords. He died of lung cancer in 1982, aged forty-five, and his legacy lives on in constrained writing, in the continuing work of the Oulipo and in readers who keep discovering his books.