An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

Georges Perec published Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu parisien in 1975, only a matter of months after the October weekend he spent observing traffic patterns and tourism in the Place de St Sulpice in Paris and writing down everything he saw. Sometimes his account feels rigorous and strict—for example, if someone walks too far to the right he tells us he is not describing nothing that takes place in his peripheral visions—but then we realize he’s constantly moving his head to the left, right, up and down, like a drone, and we wonder what’s the point? And sometimes he seems to make use of outside information—like his friends are telling him where they are going or where they have been as they pass by, whereas if he relied only on his eyes we wouldn’t find out, say, that philosopher Paul Virilio was on his way to see The Great Gatsby at the Bonaparte.Perec refers to the movie as The Lousy Gatsby, perhaps reflecting his own low opinion of the movie, but one wonders, had he already seen it? This Virilio sighting takes place on Saturday, October 19, but what the translator doesn’t make clear is that, although the notorious Mia Farrow-Robert Redford star vehicle had made its debut in the spring in America, it opened in Paris only three days before Virilio is spotted hurrying to see something Perec refers to as lousy. Hmm, portrait of Virilio as crowd-following trendoid? We all know people who have to see movies on opening week, even those with middling word-of-mouth. On paper Jack Clayton’s Gatsby looked like a sure thing, with Redford’s unstoppable golden boy appeal, paired with Mia Farrow’s still potent haunted poor little rich girl act. But when the movie came out, French people approved only of the look of the divine Lois Chiles as Jordan, and the approved American harpy slut routines of New American Cinema favorite Karen Black as Myrtle.But these speculations are necessarily far removed from the chess problem Perec sets for us. What would you see if your gaze was confined to one of the busiest intersections on earth, one with dozens of buses every half hour, and car-loads of Japanese tourists snapping cameras at signposts? It’s like that Tati movie where you see through a see-through apartment building, into the mime-like silent lives of the tenants and visitors, but Perec cheats so much the payoff suffers. And were Japanese camerabugs and English schoolboys the only foreigners walking the Place de St. Sulpice that weekend? Perhaps so, otherwise he might have mentioned a few, here and there. A general exhaustion pervades the piece. He’s tired frequently. Perhaps the onset of the illness that did him in far too early? He’s just sitting there in cafes writing down snatches of “in the distance, two boys with red anoraks” and “a bird settles atop a lamppost,” together with snippets of the old color-chase game the Situationalists used to play, following a snarl of green paper blowing through the wind tunnel caused by the appearance of so many silent, snapping Japanese people staring aimlessly at French sights. The puzzle of mass tourism persists, decades after the horror nostalgia of Hiroshima Mon Amour, but here the Japanese are staring back on one’s own Place.

If you like Paris this book will take you to sidewalk cafe sitting. The author wrote which is an observational listing of thie things he saw while sitting in a Paris cafe and watching the passing scene. Pedestrian perhaps but so is much of life.

Great book, nicely edited, great translation, thoughtful afterword by translator Marc Lowenthal.Makes you feel a bit like you are with the author, sitting on a chair in a bar, observing.I tried to estimate the hours he observed each day, and the minutes (880 min!), and then combined it in a graph relating all the words he wrote during each sitting. He did get tired by Day 3...

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 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.

I read and re-read perec’s books. This one is not an exception.

Perec’s La Disparition is legendary for being a 300-page novel that doesn’t use the letter e. It doesn’t remove this common letter: Perec simply (yeah, easy to say) doesn’t use any words with the letter in them. It’s an amazingly tough restriction that is meaningful to the subject matter of the book itself.But not nearly enough heralded is the fact that Gilbert Adair’s English translation, A Void, is also e-less, which only seems logical, but impresses me even further for having a restriction of alphabet coupled with a restriction of content, as Adair had to be e-less while honoring Perec’s content.All of the foregoing is to establish Perec as a highly intellectual writer who is tough to translate. And that I felt disappointment with this book on both ends of that dynamic. The premise is of only mild interest: Perec observes a popular spot in Paris for its more mundane details, scripted out periodically in list-like format. The end result is of mild interest at best, and I don’t fault the English translator for that but that the original comes across as an exercise rather than a final product, though the translator’s ebullient afterword comes across as overcompensating and trying to justify this extravagant expense (considering the brevity of pages you get for the price) that has such little payoff.

Less well-read than the superb A Void and Life: A User's Manual, this Oulipian treasure is a short, strange, delightful piece of writing.More of a technical exercise than anything else, and certainly not a work of fiction, this little book plays with the idea of reportage, as Perec spends a typical Parisian weekend exhaustively documenting everything he sees and hears from a series of cafe windows. At times poignant, at times repetitive, at times deeply questioning and thoughtful, Perec's Attempt is a delightful little classic of French philosophical writing.

Interesting book by a great Artist.

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. Shows how something so simple and basic as note-taking can produce a meaningful narrative of sorts. Its purity of intent is solidly interesting. (The translator's afterword is also enlightening.)