This morning serendipity brought together Hesiod and Perec. A copy of Javier Cercas’s Spanish Civil War novel ‘Soldiers of Salamis’ (Soldados de Salamina) arrived in the post at the same time as I was reading Perec’s essay ‘Approaches to what?’. Cercas’s novel has an epigraph from Hesiod (‘Works and Days’):

‘The gods desire to keep the stuff of life hidden from us’.

Perec’s essay, ‘Approaches to what’ (1973) celebrates the habitual, otherwise, ‘we sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?’ Perec proscribes that we should ‘Describe our street. Describe another street. Compare.’ [See his ‘The Rue Vilia’] and exhorts us to ‘Question (our) teaspoons’.

Perec’s ‘genial expertise’ is magnificently translated by John Sturrock in this collection of bits and pieces, journalism and short stories. More serious pieces such as ‘Robert Antelme or the truth of literature’ look at the difficulty of affording ‘the literature of the concentration camps’ honest appraisal.

One could level the criticism of ‘exercises’ at some of these pieces – a common enough accusation with regard to the OULIPO – but that is to miss the point [and indeed I missed the game in ‘243 postcards in real colour’ dedicated to Italo Calvino – it is a game, surely?].

Perec is said to have become less political as he grew older, not that he grew very old – but I think he became more political because he found a way of revolutionizing the mind-set for all who cared to look. Some of his pieces are consummate in their cataloguing of the quotidian, but nearly all inspire the reader to follow suit – and write – to try their hand and in so doing perceive new values in their worlds, thereby finding the ‘very stuff of life’! ( )

See Perec and Lists, Again at From Word to Word