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Available
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Publication
Notting Hill Editions (2011), 216 pagina's
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimElkins
Reading my way through Perec, because how is it possible to stop? This collection of short pieces has some models for prose experiments:
1. "Thoughts of Sorts / Sorts of Thoughts" is fragmentary in an uninteresting way: it could be much more intensively executed, more fictionally complete, more
"THOUGHTS / SORTS
What does the forward slash mean?
What exactly is the question? Whether I think before I sort? Whether I sort before I think?"
And so on. The problem is that there isn't much so on, and there is no clear reason why there isn't.
2. "I Remember Malet & Isaac" is an inventory of one of Perec's school books, a history of France. He inventories the table of contents, then all the words in italics, then just one picture's caption, then everything in boldface. It's also incomplete in a strangely unaccountable way, but it has a great cumulative effect: it makes me share in Perec's impatience with the old cobwebby history texts that we've all had to read.
3. "Backtracking" is a prose piece about his years in analysis, which manages to sound almost completely decathected by avoiding all talk about substance. Almost.
The problem with these pieces, for me, is that knowing "A Void," "W," and "Life: A User's Guide," I know he was capable of much more protracted concentration, which is not at all to say real exhaustiveness or actual classificatory rigor, but rather to say that I know he was capable of more interesting irrationalism.
1. "Thoughts of Sorts / Sorts of Thoughts" is fragmentary in an uninteresting way: it could be much more intensively executed, more fictionally complete, more
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obsessively classificatory. But it makes up for that unaccountable lightness (it seems that it's the product of a waning interest, or a lack of energy) by some wonderful passages, like this:"THOUGHTS / SORTS
What does the forward slash mean?
What exactly is the question? Whether I think before I sort? Whether I sort before I think?"
And so on. The problem is that there isn't much so on, and there is no clear reason why there isn't.
2. "I Remember Malet & Isaac" is an inventory of one of Perec's school books, a history of France. He inventories the table of contents, then all the words in italics, then just one picture's caption, then everything in boldface. It's also incomplete in a strangely unaccountable way, but it has a great cumulative effect: it makes me share in Perec's impatience with the old cobwebby history texts that we've all had to read.
3. "Backtracking" is a prose piece about his years in analysis, which manages to sound almost completely decathected by avoiding all talk about substance. Almost.
The problem with these pieces, for me, is that knowing "A Void," "W," and "Life: A User's Guide," I know he was capable of much more protracted concentration, which is not at all to say real exhaustiveness or actual classificatory rigor, but rather to say that I know he was capable of more interesting irrationalism.
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LibraryThing member kszym
This was an enjoyable little book of essays on, well, "Thoughts of Sorts/Sorts of Thoughts". Worthwhile for the essay on his desk alone, but the rest of it is also enjoyable and thought-provoking. They're all nice reflections on the things we do without reflection - the things we leave on our desks
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(except when we have parties), the gestures that only the bespectacled possess, the way we arrange our reading materials and the ways we read. Show Less
Original language
French
Original publication date
1985
1985 (French edition); English translation (2009)
Physical description
172 p.
ISBN
1907903003 / 9781907903007