Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces ed. by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak and Richard Phillips (review)

This collection of essays on spaces, places, and Georges Perec is Perecquian in all the best ways. It’s intelligent, systematic, and comprehensive, and at the same time playful and creative with its topic. The study is divided into two halves. The first consists of critical essays exploring in a largely conventional academic manner the representation of space and geography in Perec’s work. The second looks at the influence of Perec’s approach to space on subsequent writers and artists, and includes a mixture of discursive thought and creative practice from contributors who include a playwright, a choreographer, photographers, and travel writers, along with geographers and sociologists who take a Perecquian view of their own disciplines. In the critical essays, Perec’s Espèces d’espaces features strongly, but the studies range widely over his fiction and non-fiction. W ou le souvenir d’enfance is the subject of two interesting essays, with Andrew Leak offering a psychoanalytic interpretation of that novel’s ‘mapping of loss’ and Amanda Crawley Jackson exploring the theme of the island through Perec’s œuvre. Perec’s sometimes neglected career as cinéaste is brought to the fore in a chapter on Un homme qui dort, and his radio plays are examined in a bridging chapter from criticism to practice by Christopher Hall, which details his adaptation of the pieces for the stage. In the second half of the book, Perec’s injunction to ‘force yourself to see more flatly’ is the guiding principle for several of the contributors, who draw on Perec’s fascination with the infra-ordinary and his attempt to ‘exhaust’ the Place Saint-Sulpice in their own projects to document the Norfolk Broads in text or record fairgrounds and unremarkable urban spaces in photography. Here, and elsewhere, the book is generously supplied with colour images to accompany the text. Last of all, and giving the most substantial helping of this Perec-inspired creativity, is Kevin Boniface’s chapter on ‘When Nothing Happens in Huddersfield’. Interspersed with thoughts on and extracts from Perec’s account of the Place Saint-Sulpice is Boniface’s own Perecquian inventory of events and objects encountered on his postman’s rounds: ‘I trip over the wellington boot belonging to the man who is practising the drums with the window open and Mrs Sykes says she’s glad it’s a nice day and that junk mail is a bit of a pain but she supposes it keeps me in work’ (p. 242). It would, I’m sure, have charmed the man himself, and offers insight into how Perec would likely have approached working for the Yorkshire postal service. The book as a whole is a delight: an excellent academic resource for those interested in Perec and the representation of space (especially urban space) and a celebration of how his unique approach to his environment has inspired a new generation of creative practitioners.