An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

ISBN-13: 9780984115525 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 72 str.

Georges Perec

Opis

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the -infraordinary-: the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday---what happens, - as he put it, -when nothing happens.- His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.