By far my favorite work of Perec, and probably in my top ten books of all time. It is a great introduction to his style; if you can't get into this, don't bother with Perec. One of my favorite works struggling with the enigma of the written word, what it means to be a writer, what it means to be a reader. ( )

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is collection of non-fiction bits (translated into English for the first time) written between 1965 and 1981, though ‘non-fiction’ hardly conveys a sense of what Perec was up to. Some of the titles hint at the tone here: “M. Raymond Roussel’s mobile home,” “Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Color,” “The Gnocchi of Autumn,” “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” “Some of the Things I Really Must do Before I Die.”

As Perec says in a magazine interview from 1979 (included here), he wrote of his own experience, but experience that could not be apprehended by consciousness or feelings or ideology; ‘it’s experience grasped at the level of the setting in which your body moves, the gesture it makes, all the ordinariness connected with your clothes, with food, with traveling, with your daily routine, with the exploring of your space.’ He was meticulous in his submission to experience, since, as he says, all that we can ever really know is a very small bit of the world, ‘tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements.’ We waste too much time measuring the historic, the significant and the revelatory.

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.

“Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline” (1976) will make anyone with a stack of books next to them cry and sing and tremble deliriously in empathy, and “Species of Spaces” (1974) so resonates with our contemporary situation that the 2020 Thessalonika International Film Festival (virtual because of the pandemic) commissioned works from 22 home-bound film artists to create their own experiences of space, inspired by Perec. Brilliant.

I have been meaning to write something about Species of Spaces and Other Pieces for a while now. I read this one years ago and have returned again and again to it over the years. I need to buy a new copy as my paperback is falling apart from use.

Georges Perec was a kind of literary scientist, a very rationalist humanist, a light and free obsessive capable of making objects and buildings speak and giving them a soul simply by enumerating them in taxonomies dictated by his sensitivity as a spectator of the world.

In this little book, Perec asks what space is, from the blank of the page to that of a bed, a room, a city or the whole world: and with simple considerations, lists of visual elements and observation exercises that are proposed to doing - as if it were a very personal notebook - teaches the reader to SEE. Reading it brought me back to Betty Edwards' famous manual "Drawing with the right side of the brain", where we strive to make the aspiring designer see the world for what it is, eliminating the mental constructs we learn to superimpose on them since kindergarten .

For this reason Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is also a very photographic book. One of the exercises proposes: "Observe the road in a systematic way [...] write down what you see. Is there something that strikes us? Nothing strikes us. We do not know how to see". This condition of virgin observer is precisely the one in which I aspire to find myself when I photograph, because it brings back the joy of discovering the world and the pleasure of seeing.

The book is also interesting for its architectural and urbanistic implications (what is a neighborhood?) And contains an anticipation of that monumental labyrinth that is "Life instructions for use", which appears here as an idea for a future work. ( )

An amazing collection of stories by Perec that delve into his own personal ideas of place and the world that surrounds him. Some of the pieces are beyond magnificent, including Perec's parachuting story and the title piece, a personal exploration of the way that human beings attach themselves to places. ( )

Georges Perec (1936-1982) - “What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down.”

Georges Perec, age 45, told an interviewer how books by authors he loved when he was in his 20s were like pieces of a puzzle but there were still spaces between the pieces and those were the spaces where he could write. He went on to say how he would like to write everything in every way possible, including children’s books, science fiction, detective novels, cartoons, comedy, drama and film scripts. He also said that at the end of his life he would like to have used all the words in the dictionary and create some of his own words. One can only imagine the many books Georges Perec would have written if he lived to be 86 instead of dying of lung cancer at 46.

Ah, Georges, language as celebration; language as game; language as play. As a way of reviewing this marvelous collection, I will cite a few quotes and offer brief comments on one essay, a 95 pager, where Perec writes about spaces moving from the micro to the macro, starting with The Page, The Bed, The Bedroom, The Apartment, The Apartment Building, The Street.

The Page
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbors, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of texts. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than the alphabet?”---------- Amazing. To view the Borgesian aleph, that all-seeing sphere, as the alphabet from which all words are created. And once words are created, is there any object or space, concept or material reality, large or small, gross or subtle, that cannot be labeled, marked, identified, described or categorized by words?

The Bed
“We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways.” ---------- Oh my goodness, to see the similarities between the page one writes on (or reads from) and the bed one sleeps on.

The Bedroom
“The resurrected space of the bedroom is enough to bring back to life, to recall, to revive memories, the most fleeting and anodyne along with the most essential.” ---------- This is certainly true for me: I can’t visualize the large upstairs attic bedroom of my youth without recalling emotions and feeling I had when a child: the fear of the shadows cast on the walls at night, the sense of wonder when the sun streamed through the windows in the morning, the unsettling feelings when looking at all those odd ceiling angles.

The Apartment
“It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditory, but one might wonder what a seeery might look like, or a smellery or a feelery.” ---------- Whimsy, fancy, vision, caprice, dream.

The Street
“Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern, for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take your time. . . . Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.” --------- One could take the author’s words here as a mini-course in creative writing and creative seeing and living. As Georges Perec said in his interview, the empty spaces he leaves after his death are an invitation for others to continue the play and game of language and writing.

And in this essay he keeps on expanding: The Neighborhood, The Town, The Countryside, The Country, Europe, The World, Space. ---------- Go for it. There’s plenty of space for everyone.

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