Description

‘Perec is serious fun’ The Guardian

Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec’s I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos.

In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with ‘I remember’, Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia.

As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

Publisher Review

'So full of interest and memory . . . I have enjoyed it so much' Dame Margaret Drabble 'The effect of cascading "I remembers" is unavoidably mesmerizing' Paris Review 'One of the oddest works of literature ever written' David Bellos, from the Introduction 'Je me souviens is only a small piece of Perec-autobiography, but it is an appealing one, suggestive and whimsical' Complete Review 'To read Georges Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and ... they are prodigiously entertaining' Paul Auster 'One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else' Italo Calvino 'Perec is a great storyteller and a wry humorist' The Telegraph 'Perec's passion for classification, for enumeration, for lists, for patterns, for the thinginess of things, is strangely captivating and, despite an underlying melancholy, exhilarating' Margaret Drabble, New Statesman