Publication
Vleugels, 2017
ISBN
9789078627319
Language
Collections
Description
"One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the nonevent, 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, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually 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."--P. [4] of cover.… (more)
Genres
User reviews
LibraryThing member cameling
Pick a comfortable cafe or park bench, take out a notebook and sit for a few hours. How much activity would you be able to observe in the time you're sitting there? How much do we miss because we aren't mindful of the activity that takes place throughout the day? From fluttering pigeons, to how
This short journal gives us a glimpse of how much life takes place through various periods in a day over 3 days.
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often the number 96 bus passes, to when children run down the sidewalk or a man walks his dog?This short journal gives us a glimpse of how much life takes place through various periods in a day over 3 days.
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LibraryThing member Widsith
When my daughter was born last year we were living in Paris's sixth arrondissement, and every weekend, while my wife was at work presenting the news, I would walk up the rue du Cherche-Midi with the pushchair, cut right down rue du Vieux Colombier, and then circle round and round the Place
The church there is my favourite in Paris, as beautiful as Notre-Dame but much quieter, and with an amazing organ whose organist used to practise sometimes on quiet Sunday afternoons. This was where Talleyrand was christened, and the Marquis de Sade, to name but two. Outside in the square is a well-known fountain and a few trees that provide some slowly-revolving blocks of shade during the day.
I must have seen that square in every weather and from every angle – I've sat on every stone bench and I've had a coffee at every table in the one remaining café. I've watched a priest trip on the church steps and go flying into a cyclist, and I've been laughed at by unsympathetic tourists when my daughter projectile vomited all over herself, all over me, and all over the paperback I was reading at the time (Nightwood, which not incidentally is largely set in an apartment above the café on this very square).
I feel, therefore, uniquely qualified to review this little extrait de carnet from Georges Perec, who set himself the task of simply observing everything that he could see in the Place Saint-Sulpice as he sat there with a notebook over a weekend in October 1974.
It's the sort of exercise you might do quite regularly as a writer, but it's not the sort of thing you'd normally publish raw. And I did go back and forth with this short book: at first I found it just as banal as it sounds; then I started to find it all rather invigorating; and then unfortunately by the end I started to find it all a bit pointless again.
This is a book whose value resides almost entirely in your own head, and not in the words on the page – which of course is true for all books, but sometimes it takes a minimalist text like this to remind you of the fact.
Perec's descriptions are extremely bare, almost catalogic. He is weirdly obsessed with the buses:
A 96 goes past. An 87 goes past. An 86 goes past. A 70 goes past. A ‘Grenelle Interlinge’ truck goes past.
Calm. No one at the bus stop.
A 63 goes past. A 96 goes past.
If you are waiting for him to start reflecting on what he sees, to speculate in some way or to draw inferences about the scene – basically, to make things up – you will be waiting a long time. There is not much of that; which I found strange, because after twenty minutes sitting there rocking a pushchair with my foot, I had already given all the pigeons names and invented a lubricious back-story for the brunette waiting outside the town hall. If I had written this book it would doubtless be filled with a lot of that kind of thing, but Perec either has a less wandering mind than I do or (more likely) he is keeping himself deliberately restrained, factual, camera-like. By the end of the book we are still being fed such apparent banalities as:
The traffic lights turn red (this happens to them often)
I was interested to see how much of the scene I recognised, and certainly a lot has not changed: the descriptions of women coming out of mass holding pyramidal packets from the local patisserie, or of men outside the tabac tearing the cellophane off cigarette packs, could have been written yesterday.
He kept talking about deux-chevaux going past, and I was idly wondering was this meant until suddenly as I read it for the fifth time I realised he was talking about those old Citroën 2CVs. Man, those things used to be everywhere, didn't they!? That suddenly made it all feel a lot more seventies. And then this got me wondering about dog-shit, which Perec does not mention; but I'm sure dog-shit used to be everywhere in Paris – right? I mean I wasn't around in 1974, but I'm sure I remember from holidays in the 80s that there was A LOT of it. Perec apparently doesn't see any. J'accuse, Georges!
Anyway, you can see some of the value this might have for future generations. God knows it would be great to read a document like this written in, let's say, 1874, or 1574 for that matter.
Beyond that, your reaction to Tentative d'épuisement will depend on many factors. I no longer get excited about experimentation for its own sake, nor do I think this is a very innovative project in the first place. Nevertheless parts of it, with their dedication to developing awareness and observation, won me round, and the final few lines started to read like free verse; I was unexpectedly moved.
Oh. And on the last page, I suddenly read this:
Passe un jeune papa portant son bébé endormi sur son dos (et un parapluie à la main)
and oh god I know it's stupid, but I suddenly couldn't help imagining that Georges, sitting there at his café in 1974, squinting out through the rain, was watching me trudge into his field of vision from 2012, hugging my baby with one hand, and with one of his books, or something very like it, jammed in the back pocket of my jeans.
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Saint-Sulpice for hours on end waiting for Clementine to go to sleep.The church there is my favourite in Paris, as beautiful as Notre-Dame but much quieter, and with an amazing organ whose organist used to practise sometimes on quiet Sunday afternoons. This was where Talleyrand was christened, and the Marquis de Sade, to name but two. Outside in the square is a well-known fountain and a few trees that provide some slowly-revolving blocks of shade during the day.
I must have seen that square in every weather and from every angle – I've sat on every stone bench and I've had a coffee at every table in the one remaining café. I've watched a priest trip on the church steps and go flying into a cyclist, and I've been laughed at by unsympathetic tourists when my daughter projectile vomited all over herself, all over me, and all over the paperback I was reading at the time (Nightwood, which not incidentally is largely set in an apartment above the café on this very square).
I feel, therefore, uniquely qualified to review this little extrait de carnet from Georges Perec, who set himself the task of simply observing everything that he could see in the Place Saint-Sulpice as he sat there with a notebook over a weekend in October 1974.
It's the sort of exercise you might do quite regularly as a writer, but it's not the sort of thing you'd normally publish raw. And I did go back and forth with this short book: at first I found it just as banal as it sounds; then I started to find it all rather invigorating; and then unfortunately by the end I started to find it all a bit pointless again.
This is a book whose value resides almost entirely in your own head, and not in the words on the page – which of course is true for all books, but sometimes it takes a minimalist text like this to remind you of the fact.
Perec's descriptions are extremely bare, almost catalogic. He is weirdly obsessed with the buses:
A 96 goes past. An 87 goes past. An 86 goes past. A 70 goes past. A ‘Grenelle Interlinge’ truck goes past.
Calm. No one at the bus stop.
A 63 goes past. A 96 goes past.
If you are waiting for him to start reflecting on what he sees, to speculate in some way or to draw inferences about the scene – basically, to make things up – you will be waiting a long time. There is not much of that; which I found strange, because after twenty minutes sitting there rocking a pushchair with my foot, I had already given all the pigeons names and invented a lubricious back-story for the brunette waiting outside the town hall. If I had written this book it would doubtless be filled with a lot of that kind of thing, but Perec either has a less wandering mind than I do or (more likely) he is keeping himself deliberately restrained, factual, camera-like. By the end of the book we are still being fed such apparent banalities as:
The traffic lights turn red (this happens to them often)
I was interested to see how much of the scene I recognised, and certainly a lot has not changed: the descriptions of women coming out of mass holding pyramidal packets from the local patisserie, or of men outside the tabac tearing the cellophane off cigarette packs, could have been written yesterday.
He kept talking about deux-chevaux going past, and I was idly wondering was this meant until suddenly as I read it for the fifth time I realised he was talking about those old Citroën 2CVs. Man, those things used to be everywhere, didn't they!? That suddenly made it all feel a lot more seventies. And then this got me wondering about dog-shit, which Perec does not mention; but I'm sure dog-shit used to be everywhere in Paris – right? I mean I wasn't around in 1974, but I'm sure I remember from holidays in the 80s that there was A LOT of it. Perec apparently doesn't see any. J'accuse, Georges!
Anyway, you can see some of the value this might have for future generations. God knows it would be great to read a document like this written in, let's say, 1874, or 1574 for that matter.
Beyond that, your reaction to Tentative d'épuisement will depend on many factors. I no longer get excited about experimentation for its own sake, nor do I think this is a very innovative project in the first place. Nevertheless parts of it, with their dedication to developing awareness and observation, won me round, and the final few lines started to read like free verse; I was unexpectedly moved.
Oh. And on the last page, I suddenly read this:
Passe un jeune papa portant son bébé endormi sur son dos (et un parapluie à la main)
and oh god I know it's stupid, but I suddenly couldn't help imagining that Georges, sitting there at his café in 1974, squinting out through the rain, was watching me trudge into his field of vision from 2012, hugging my baby with one hand, and with one of his books, or something very like it, jammed in the back pocket of my jeans.
Show Less
LibraryThing member vpfluke
Although, this small book does not compare with "Life A Users Manual", Perec's masterpiece, I rather enjoyed this book of observations in the St. Sulpice District of Paris. In tracking all the small things in the area where he hangs out, I am reminded of myself. I have kept track of buses myself,
I have read this book at the same time as "Paris", by Julian Green, a more romantic memoir, but worth the read also. Green was an American who lived almost his entire life in France, and was a member of the Académie Française.
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although in reality this has been part of my professional life as Manager of Bus Scheduling. I ended up goggling the map of where Perec watched, and looking up the bus routes and their schedules, to see what I might further discern. I might have been unduced to sneak a look inside the bus to ge and idea of who is riding. But Perec does give us some quick looks at the people walking about. Perec is aware of the scene, but not in the scene, as it were, and I understand this posture.I have read this book at the same time as "Paris", by Julian Green, a more romantic memoir, but worth the read also. Green was an American who lived almost his entire life in France, and was a member of the Académie Française.
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
This is an excellent illustration of a problem with purely descriptive, unvoiced, "unoriginal" writing: the more it attempts to be "unoriginal" in Marjorie Perloff's sense, the more meaning is infused. Perec's project is to describe the "infraordinary": everything about this square in Paris that is
Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective, or neutral, standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the opening session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. This would be a limited and plausible game, like a child's game of naming letters on signs. But by the bottom of the first page -- six short paragraphs from the beginning -- he writes:
—Ground: packed gravel and sand.
This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and it's clearly also an indication of where he will stop. He won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) are similar announcements of the limits of his project:
—Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...
—Asphalt
—Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
These are indications of refusals. Flaubert, for example, would have been expected to write at length on those things. Then, two more paragraphs down:
—Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
This is self-reflexive, about what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):
—Human beings
Now the voice is ironic. In the space of 1 1/2 very short pages, the tone is rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. then comes a heading:
Trajectories
The 96 goes to Montparnasse station
The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret
The 70 goes to Placd du Dr Hayen...
This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games.
This is just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. All this has to raise the question of whether there is a larger plan, a game that comprehends these partial games.
My conclusion is: the book is interesting for the continuously renewed interest in the kinds of literary and non-literary voices and references the writing conjures, not for the descriptive attempt or for any notion of the infraordinary. The very project of the infraordinary is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that are floating and assembling in his mind.
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not recorded in the history and tourism books, and, by implication, in novels. He spends a lot of his weekend noting what people are eating or carrying, and he spends a lot of the first day noting when different buses go by. But even the first two pages are dense with implied narratives, and it is those narratives that give the project interest, not the lists of "infraordinary" events.Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective, or neutral, standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the opening session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. This would be a limited and plausible game, like a child's game of naming letters on signs. But by the bottom of the first page -- six short paragraphs from the beginning -- he writes:
—Ground: packed gravel and sand.
This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and it's clearly also an indication of where he will stop. He won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) are similar announcements of the limits of his project:
—Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...
—Asphalt
—Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
These are indications of refusals. Flaubert, for example, would have been expected to write at length on those things. Then, two more paragraphs down:
—Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
This is self-reflexive, about what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):
—Human beings
Now the voice is ironic. In the space of 1 1/2 very short pages, the tone is rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. then comes a heading:
Trajectories
The 96 goes to Montparnasse station
The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret
The 70 goes to Placd du Dr Hayen...
This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games.
This is just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. All this has to raise the question of whether there is a larger plan, a game that comprehends these partial games.
My conclusion is: the book is interesting for the continuously renewed interest in the kinds of literary and non-literary voices and references the writing conjures, not for the descriptive attempt or for any notion of the infraordinary. The very project of the infraordinary is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that are floating and assembling in his mind.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kidzdoc
Perec decides to record "infraordinary" events outside of Parisian cafés during a three day weekend in October 1974, and he succinctly describes the mundanity and banality that he sees: numerous buses pass by; people engage in ordinary conversations and activities; birds fly together in
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nonsensical patterns and return to their previous positions. Perec does not analyze, he only observes, which made for a mildly interesting but somewhat disappointing read. Show Less
LibraryThing member JimElkins
This is an excellent illustration of a problem with purely descriptive, unvoiced, "unoriginal" writing: the more it attempts to be "unoriginal" in Marjorie Perloff's sense, the more meaning is infused. Perec's project is to describe the "infraordinary": everything about this square in Paris that is
Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective, or neutral, standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the opening session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. This would be a limited and plausible game, like a child's game of naming letters on signs. But by the bottom of the first page -- six short paragraphs from the beginning -- he writes:
—Ground: packed gravel and sand.
This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and it's clearly also an indication of where he will stop. He won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) are similar announcements of the limits of his project:
—Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...
—Asphalt
—Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
These are indications of refusals. Flaubert, for example, would have been expected to write at length on those things. Then, two more paragraphs down:
—Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
This is self-reflexive, about what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):
—Human beings
Now the voice is ironic. In the space of 1 1/2 very short pages, the tone is rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. then comes a heading:
Trajectories
The 96 goes to Montparnasse station
The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret
The 70 goes to Placd du Dr Hayen...
This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games.
This is just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. All this has to raise the question of whether there is a larger plan, a game that comprehends these partial games.
My conclusion is: the book is interesting for the continuously renewed interest in the kinds of literary and non-literary voices and references the writing conjures, not for the descriptive attempt or for any notion of the infraordinary. The very project of the infraordinary is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that are floating and assembling in his mind.
Show More
not recorded in the history and tourism books, and, by implication, in novels. He spends a lot of his weekend noting what people are eating or carrying, and he spends a lot of the first day noting when different buses go by. But even the first two pages are dense with implied narratives, and it is those narratives that give the project interest, not the lists of "infraordinary" events.Each session begins with a header, labeled DATE, TIME, LOCATION, and WEATHER, emulating the news, and announcing a deadpan and perhaps objective, or neutral, standpoint. The opening paragraphs of the opening session list letters of the alphabet that he can see from where he's sitting. This would be a limited and plausible game, like a child's game of naming letters on signs. But by the bottom of the first page -- six short paragraphs from the beginning -- he writes:
—Ground: packed gravel and sand.
This is a deviation from his letter-and-number game, and it's clearly also an indication of where he will stop. He won't inventory every pebble or brick. The next paragraphs (p. 6) are similar announcements of the limits of his project:
—Stone: the curbs, a fountain, a chuch, buildings...
—Asphalt
—Trees (leafy, many yellowing)
These are indications of refusals. Flaubert, for example, would have been expected to write at length on those things. Then, two more paragraphs down:
—Vehicles (their inventory remains to be made)
This is self-reflexive, about what the writer might intend to go on and accomplish. Then (the next paragraph):
—Human beings
Now the voice is ironic. In the space of 1 1/2 very short pages, the tone is rule-bound (listing letters and numbers), obstinate (refusing, by implication, the project of naturalistic description), self-reflexive, and ironic. then comes a heading:
Trajectories
The 96 goes to Montparnasse station
The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret
The 70 goes to Placd du Dr Hayen...
This is different again: this time the writer is searching for new games.
This is just the first two pages. In the following two, the voice and intention changes again several times. There is found poetry, hopeless inventorying, compulsive listing, abandoned lists, vignettes from imaginary novels, and touches of surrealism. All this has to raise the question of whether there is a larger plan, a game that comprehends these partial games.
My conclusion is: the book is interesting for the continuously renewed interest in the kinds of literary and non-literary voices and references the writing conjures, not for the descriptive attempt or for any notion of the infraordinary. The very project of the infraordinary is entirely soaked in the mixtures of writing projects that are floating and assembling in his mind.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BlackGlove
The light of day
A cool little book. Perec's brief field-of-vision experiment will appeal mostly to writers. The way it strips back writing to the bare minimum of factual observation and yet still a work of literature is created. It's like hitting a reset button on the over-thinking imagination.
A cool little book. Perec's brief field-of-vision experiment will appeal mostly to writers. The way it strips back writing to the bare minimum of factual observation and yet still a work of literature is created. It's like hitting a reset button on the over-thinking imagination.
Show More
Shows how something so simple and basic as note-taking can produce a meaningful narrative of sorts. Its purity of intent is solidly interesting. Show Less
Original publication date
1975 (fr)
2010 (English translation)