In the spring of 1981, Georges Perec, the inventive French novelist and author of the cult hit Life: A User's Manual announced to his lover Catherine: "I'm going to Australia to write a book in 53 days." Why would anyone decide to write a novel in such a rigid time span? Because Stendhal had taken exactly 53 days to dictate his last work, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Perec's fiction is full of such playful games, diversions and clever devices. David Bellos has translated all of Perec's major work and became his biographer with this massive and reverential 700 pages plus study. Perec died of cancer in March 1982 at 46 after a brief illness and became famous posthumously with the publication in English of Life: A User's Manual in 1987. After the success of that novel, which chronicled a year in the life of the residents in a Paris apartment building, his other work became available in English. In W, or The Memory of Childhood (1988), Perec's traumatic story as the son of Polish Jews who disappeared during the second World War began to emerge. Things: A Story of the Sixties (1990), his first book, and one which earned him an immediate following in France in 1965, confirmed to his English readers that Perec was an unusual French writer in that he balanced his intellectual gymnastics with an appealing and engaging humanity. Bellos has investigated absolutely everything and has spoken to many people who knew Perec. But his biography as blatant, unedited labour of love is excessively long and written in a cloyingly knowing tone - curious, considering he never met the writer. Though certainly an original, Perec strikes one as an irritating, uncertain individual desperately damaged by his parents' fate. Bellos has interwoven the work with the life to an almost suffocating extent. Far more convincing on the work than the man, he is not a natural biographer; he has no selectivity, but is a shrewd, scholarly textual reader. Do experience Perec's lively work, but read this over praised book exclusively on the basis of its textual scholarship, which - at times - compensates for the heavy handed, flattering exploration of a short, dull life.
