Written in alternating chapters, "W or the Memory of Childhood" tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

This marvellous book is one of the most ingenious works of modern fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of ever more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...

Il y a dans ce livre deux textes simplement alternés; il pourrait presque sembler qu'ils n'ont rien en commun, mais ils sont pourtant inextricablement enchevêtrés, comme si aucun des deux ne pouvait exister seul, comme si de leur rencontre seule, de cette lumière lointaine qu'ils jettent l'un sur l'autre, pouvait se révéler ce qui n'est jamais tout à fait dit dans l'un, jamais tout à fait dit dans l'autre, mais seulement dans leur fragile intersection.
L'un de ces textes appartient tout entier à l'imaginaire: c'est un roman d'aventures, la reconstitution, arbitraire mais minutieuse, d'un fantasme enfantin évoquant une cité régie par l'idéal olympique. L'autre texte est une autobiographie: le récit fragmentaire d'une vie d'enfant pendant la guerre, un récit pauvre d'exploits et de souvenirs, fait de bribes éparses, d'absences, d'ouvlis, de doutes, d'hypothèses, d'anecdotes maigres. Le récit d'aventures, à côté, a quelque chose de grandiose, ou peut-être de suspect. Car il commence par raconter une histoire et, d'un seul coup, se lance dans une autre: dans cette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le récit autour d'on ne sait quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d'où est sorti ce livre, ces points de suspention auxquels se sont accrochés les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'écriture.
G.P.

【http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=169732&PostID=39327719&idWriter=0&Key=0】
乔治·佩雷克30周年忌辰 真处女作《佣兵队长》上市
康慨
3月7日是法国作家乔治·佩雷克的冥诞，刚刚过去的3月3日，则标志着这位留着双份熊掌胡子的早夭天才去世30周年。瑟伊出版社适时推出了他从未出版过的小说处女作《佣兵队长》（Le Condottière），以志纪念。
此前，公认佩雷克的处女作是1965年出版、并获当年勒诺多奖的《物》（Les Choses）。但他本人说过，《佣兵队长》才是他“第一本成熟的小说”（le premier roman abouti）。此书写于1957到1960年间，佚失甚久，终于寻获。
《佣兵队长》取侦探小说外壳，由一宗赝品画师谋杀案出发，描写主人公加斯帕尔·温克勒追踪一幅未完成的名画伪作，在连串的假物象中，努力求取真相。
《佣兵队长》实有其画，由15世纪意大利画家墨西拿的安托内洛作于1475年，本为多幅同题《男像》的肖像画之一，后得约定俗成的专名，现藏巴黎卢浮宫。小说亦以此画作为封面。
1936年3月7日，乔治·佩雷克生于巴黎，父母皆为波兰移民。４岁前后，爸爸死于战场，妈妈被德国鬼子掳去，1943年后的某个时间在奥斯威辛遭到杀害。佩雷克由姑姑和叔叔带大，以《物》成名，但他最著名的小说作品，当属1978年出版、并获美第奇奖的《生活使用说明》（La Vie mode d’emploi）。读过此书的读者，或许还记得里面也有位加斯帕尔·温克勒，以死人的身份出现。
佩雷克还以技艺非凡的法语文体和文字实验家闻名，他甚至出过两本灭除元音的书，第一本里没有e，第二本里只有e。
他是高度狂热的烟民，1982年死于肺癌，享年46岁差４天。
龚觅译《物：60年代纪事》由新星出版社发行于2010年，译后记独占此书三分之一的篇幅。《生活使用说明》则由丁雪英、连燕堂翻译，以《人生拼图版》之名，1999年由安徽文艺出版社出版。

Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as one of the great novels of the century. We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User's Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future. Structured around a single moment in time 8:00 P.M. on June 23, 1975, Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, an extraordinarily rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary.

Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun.
Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: "I'll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I'll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk."
An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is - in the words of David Bellos, the "faithful exegete" who brought it to light - "connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create - but it's not like anything else that he wrote".

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

From the author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Nazi occupation of France.
Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry.
As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live...[with] no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, rape common, stealing encouraged and violence a fact of life.
Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those "shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores"? How did this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?
This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe 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; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally 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.

Trahir qui disparut, dans La disparition, ravirait au lisant subtil tout plaisir. Motus donc, sur l'inconnu noyau manquant - " un rond pas tout à fait clos finissant par un trait horizontal " -, blanc sillon damnatif où s'abîma un Anton Voyl, mais où surgit aussi la fiction. Disions, sans plus, qu'il a rapport à la vocalisation. L'aiguillon paraîtra à d'aucun trop grammatical. Vain soupçon : contraint par son savant pari à moult combinaisons, allusions, substitutions ou circonclusions, jamais G.P. n'arracha au banal discours joyaux plus brillants ni si purs. Jamais plus fol alibi n'accoucha d'avatars si mirobolants. Oui, il fallait un grand art, un art hors du commun, pour fournir tout un roman sans ça !
B. Pingaud.

Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.