David Bellos

Undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation, Georges Perec achieved international celebrity with Life: A User's Manual. A Frenchman by formation and a Jew by heredity, Perec began his career as a writer auspiciously when his first novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties, was awarded the Prix Renaudot. He then followed a modest yet fascinating itinerary through the intellectual and literary ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s until the publication of Life: A User's Manual propelled him into the limelight. Much of his most interesting work came through his contact with a radically inventive group of writers (OuLiPo) whose members included Queneau and Calvino. Perec died in 1982 while still only in his mid-forties. David Bellos, who has done most to introduce Perec to an English-speaking readership, has written a comprehensive and elegant biography of an anguished, comical and endearingly ordinary man.

Undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation, Georges Perec achieved international celebrity with Life: A User's Manual. A Frenchman by formation and a Jew by heredity, Perec began his career as a writer auspiciously when his first novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties, was awarded the Prix Renaudot. He then followed a modest yet fascinating itinerary through the intellectual and literary ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s until the publication of Life: A User's Manual propelled him into the limelight. Much of his most interesting work came through his contact with a radically inventive group of writers (OuLiPo) whose members included Queneau and Calvino. Perec died in 1982 while still only in his mid-forties. David Bellos, who has done most to introduce Perec to an English-speaking readership, has written a comprehensive and elegant biography of an anguished, comical and endearingly ordinary man.