An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges PerecTranslated by Marc LowenthalWakefield Press, 2010

In October 1974, Georges Perec spent many hours over the course of three days (a Friday/Saturday/Sunday) sitting in cafés on the place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. This book, which was originally published in French in 1975, is the result. It’s divided into days, and into numbered sections within each day. Each day starts with the date, time, location, and weather, and then Perec goes on to write about what’s around him, focusing on “that which is not generally taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds” (3). The results are largely list-like, with some slightly more narrative passages interspersed; on my first reading of the book I found it choppy, but on a second read-through I somehow imagined the rhythm of this Parisian square better, and liked the book more. Perec starts writing about the things he sees, some of which are whole categories of things: letters/words (on signs, vehicles, clothing), symbols (the arrows on one-way signs), vehicles, people, trees, pigeons; he also notes things like the sky, and specifics like “lettuce (curly endive?) partially emerging from a shopping bag” (6).

He notes down buses and where they go and whether they’re full or empty; he notes down colors he sees (on people’s clothes, cars, umbrellas). He notes down the kinds of things people are holding (“a bag, a briefcase, a shopping bag, a cane, a leash with a dog at the end, a child’s hand”) and the “degrees of determination” with which people move (“waiting, sauntering, dawdling, wandering, going, running toward, rushing (toward a free taxi, for instance), seeking, idling about, hesitating, walking with determination”) (8, 10). He’s aware, of course, of the futility of trying to notice everything, but he still notes down what he’s failed to notice, like when he realizes that there are now two mopeds on the sidewalk where previously there were three. He writes about the differences between one day and the next, one moment and the next, one scene he observes and another: he writes about “micro-events” and “micro-accidents.” He writes about order and disorder, the buses with their schedules and routes as opposed to the people moving through the square who are following trajectories and logic of their own but who give an effect, to an outside observer, of the “random, improbable, anarchic” (22). There are flashes of humor (though this is also I suppose a statement about how little an observer can know about the scene being observed): “A little girl, flanked by her parents (or by her kidnappers) is weeping” (36).

I’ve been meaning to read this book for several years now, and was prompted to pick it up because someone else’s Goodreads review of another book I recently read said that other book was “like an ambulatory version” of this one. The other book (Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/Two Talks) is set in New York, not Paris, and is more prose than list, and focuses on slightly different things than this book does, but there’s definitely a similar exploration of the everyday. (As Marc Lowenthal writes in his translator’s afterword, this book “was one of Perec’s clearer efforts to grapple with what he termed the “infraordinary”: the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives” (51).) So yes: a pleasing juxtaposition.


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