Quotes About Perec

Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of 'postmodernism' I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book: an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more especially, and in addition, of having in the end found kin again.

Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission

Tu inercia es ta vana como tu cólera p.114

But in the case of the novel by Perec, who has no fewer than four e's in his own name, the deliberate elimination of the e was perhaps not just a conceptual antic but had an emotional source and an emotional effect.