Espèces d'espaces

by Georges Perec

Paper Book, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

848.91409

Genres

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Paris : Éd. Galilée, 2010.

Description

Georges Perec (1936-82), author of the novel Life- A User's Manual, was one of the most surprising and enjoyable of all modern French writers. The pieces in this volume show him to be at times playful, more serious at others, but always with the lightest of touches. He had the keenest of eyes for the "infra-ordinary", the things we do everyday - eating, sleeping, working - and the places we do them in without giving them a moment's thought. But behind the lightness and humour, there is also the sadness of a French Jewish boy who lost his parents in the Second World War and found comfort in the material world around him, and above all in writing.This volume contains a selection of Georges Perec's non-fiction works, along with a charming short story. It includes notes and an introduction describing Perec's life and career.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member MichaelMac

A book to trigger ideas for writers, and maybe other creatives, by inspiring them to really see what they are seeing.

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LibraryThing member KimMarie1

It just goes to prove that oftentimes the best things come in small packages. Perec essentially looks at the various "Spaces" we inhabit in our everyday lives - from our bedrooms to our city blocks to our neighbors, our country and the world at large. His clever insights make the mundane seem

extraordinary. I think he challenges us to open our minds to creatively look at the world around us not as a series of confinements but as a series of opportunities for reflection, playfulness and adventure. It's refreshingly original.

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LibraryThing member modioperandi

I have been meaning to write something about Species of Spaces and Other Pieces for a while now. I read this one years ago and have returned again and again to it over the years. I need to buy a new copy as my paperback is falling apart from use.

Georges Perec was a kind of literary scientist, a

very rationalist humanist, a light and free obsessive capable of making objects and buildings speak and giving them a soul simply by enumerating them in taxonomies dictated by his sensitivity as a spectator of the world.

In this little book, Perec asks what space is, from the blank of the page to that of a bed, a room, a city or the whole world: and with simple considerations, lists of visual elements and observation exercises that are proposed to doing - as if it were a very personal notebook - teaches the reader to SEE. Reading it brought me back to Betty Edwards' famous manual "Drawing with the right side of the brain", where we strive to make the aspiring designer see the world for what it is, eliminating the mental constructs we learn to superimpose on them since kindergarten .

For this reason Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is also a very photographic book. One of the exercises proposes: "Observe the road in a systematic way [...] write down what you see. Is there something that strikes us? Nothing strikes us. We do not know how to see". This condition of virgin observer is precisely the one in which I aspire to find myself when I photograph, because it brings back the joy of discovering the world and the pleasure of seeing.

The book is also interesting for its architectural and urbanistic implications (what is a neighborhood?) And contains an anticipation of that monumental labyrinth that is "Life instructions for use", which appears here as an idea for a future work.

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