Collected Prose

was filled with numerous small notations in the margins, as well as stress marks that Reznikoff had made throughout the poems in an effort to scan them correctly and understand their rhythms. Helpless to do or say anything, I thanked him from the other side of the grave.
    Wherever Edwin Arlington Robinson might be now, one can be sure that his accommodations aren’t half as good as Charles Reznikoff’s.

    1983

The Bartlebooth Follies

    Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of forty-six, leaving behind a dozen books and a brilliant reputation. In the words of Italo Calvino, he was “one of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.” It has taken a while for us to catch on, but now that his major work has at last been translated into English — Life: A User’s Manual (1978) — it will be impossible for us to think of contemporary French writing in the same way again.
    Born into a Jewish family from Poland that emigrated to France in the 1920s, Perec lost his father in the German invasion of 1940 and his mother to the concentration camps in 1943. “I have no memories of childhood,” he would later write. His literary career began early, and by the age of nineteen he was already publishing critical notes in the NRF and Les Lettres Nouvelles . His first novel, Les Choses , was awarded the Prix Renadot for 1965, and from then until his death he published approximately one book a year.
    Given his tragic family history, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Perec was essentially a comic writer. For the last fifteen years of his life, in fact, he was an active member of Oulipo, a strange literary society founded by Raymond Queneau and the mathematician Francois le Lionnais. This Workshop for Potential Literature ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle ) proposes all kinds of madcap operations to writers: the S-7 method (rewriting famous poems by replacing each word with the seventh word that follows it in the dictionary), the Lipogram (eliminating the use of one or more letters in a text), acrostics, palindromes, permutations, anagrams, and numerous other “literary constraints.” As one of the leading lights of this group, Perec once wrote an entire novel of more than 200 pages without using the letter “e”; this novel was followed by another in which “e” is the only vowel that appears. Verbal gymnastics of this sort seemed to come naturally to him. In addition to his literary work, he produced a notoriously difficult weekly crossword puzzle for the news magazine Le Point.
    To read Georges Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and if they are not necessarily profound (in the sense that Tolstoy and Mann are profound), they are prodigiously entertaining (in the sense that Lewis Carroll and Laurence Sterne are entertaining). In Chapter Two of “Life,” for example, Perec refers to “the score of a famous American melody, ‘Gertrude of Wyoming,’ by Arthur Stanley Jefferson.” By pure chance, I happened to know that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was the real name of the comedian Stan Laurel, but just because I caught this allusion does not mean there weren’t a thousand others that escaped me.
    For the mathematically inclined, there are magic squares and chess moves to be discovered in this novel, but the fact that I was unable to find them did not diminish my enjoyment of the book. Those who have read a great deal will no doubt recognize passages that quote directly or indirectly from other writers — Kafka, Agatha Christie, Melville, Freud, Rabelais, Nabokov, Jules Verne and a host of others — but failure to recognize them should not be considered a handicap. Like Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec had a mind that was a storehouse of curious bits of knowledge and awesome erudition, and half the time the reader can’t be sure if he is being conned or enlightened. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter. What draws one into this book is not Perec’s cleverness, but the deftness and clarity of his style, a flow of language that manages to sustain one’s interest through endless lists, catalogues, and descriptions. Perec had an uncanny gift for articulating the nuances of the material world, and in his hands even a worm-eaten table can become an object of fascination. “It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was