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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris - by Georges Perec (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- "Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.
- Author(s): Georges Perec
- 72 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
Originally published in French as Tentative d'âepuisement d'un lieu parisien. Christian Bourgois âEditeur, 1975.Book Synopsis
"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going." -Ian Klaus, CityLab
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 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; 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.
Review Quotes
We're shoulder to shoulder with many universes; countless lives, hopes, dreams and fears as complicated as our own, all clustered in the same crowded shops, train cars and sidewalks. Why ignore all that?--Anna Kodé "The New York Times: Magazine"
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is about the kinds of ordinary occurrences that make up the experience of sitting in a café. Much of the book reads like a list. It is a kind of inventory: an attempt to catalogue, to exhaust, a place.--Susan Harlan "Literary Hub"
Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.--Ian Klaus "CityLab"