his neighbours “with a sort of low grunt”, until finally he disappears altogether.
Organising information
Organisation of information is a running theme throughout the novel, from Monsieur Jérôme, the history teacher hired to create a card index of the Spanish clergy, to the former bike racer Lino Margay, who flees his unhappy wife due to a hideous facial disfigurement and becomes a gangster in South America. Known as El Fichero (The Index), his comprehensive knowledge of other underworld characters and their business affairs gives him a certain legend- ary status. The puzzle maker Gaspard Winckler even talks about cataloguing his hotel envelope labels into some sort of order (whether by continent, country or matching details), but can’t decide how best to go about it.
Perec himself was labelled a “virtu- oso of manual information-retrieval systems” and the “king of filing-card schemes”, when in 1961 he was hired as documentaliste at the Hôpital Sainte- Anne. Tasked with organising the unit’s research library, Perec immediately set about radically overhauling their informa- tion retrieval system, attending scientific conferences on subjects he knew nothing about, and even studying graph theory to try and improve categorisation. He also introduced two new cutting-edge filing card systems, the latter consisting of “a grand total of a hundred thousand cards,
December-January 2017/18
every one of them typed up, coded, and hole-punched by Georges Perec.”
Three indexes Despite his intense interest in informa- tion management, Perec also liked to play games in his work: creating index card records for his own novels, or citing one of his characters in a scientific bibliography. As his creativity crept into his day job, so too did the nature of his work begin to seep into his writing; several chapters in the book end with short bibliographies, and while it is unusual for a work of fiction to contain an index, Perec’s book has three. Everything in the book is described in excruciating detail, from what people have on their bedside tables, to the pictures on the walls and the fine print on posters and packaging; even a supposedly empty room has a whole paragraph devoted to it. Many readers have abandoned the novel early
on for this very reason, exasperated at the relentless level of description, but when read as a kind of fictional metadata or story abstract, the effect is strangely satisfying. IP
The author and his works
Perec died in 1982 of lung cancer at the age of 45, less than four years after he finally left his job as an archivist. Most of his books are now available in English translation, including his essays on libraries and classification in the collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
Quotations taken from Georges Perec, Life: a user’s manual, translated by David Bellos (London: Vintage, 2003), and David Bellos, Georges Perec: a life in words (London: Harvill, 1993).
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