Georges Perec (1936 - 82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. This comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His idiosyncratic and ambitious literary journey took him through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, belonging to the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, a radically inventive group of writers. He died after a short illness in 1982.
This stunning biography enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature.
Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994
