Suchergebnisse

Verlagsinfo: Quasi über Nacht berühmt wurde Georges Perec mit diesem 1965 erschienenen Werk, für das er den renommierten Prix Renaudot erhielt und das sich 50 Jahre nach der Erstausgabe als aktueller denn je erweist. Perec beschreibt in diesem schmalen Buch das Leben des jungen Paares Jérôme und Sylvie als ganz und gar von Dingen bestimmt, die sie besitzen oder besitzen wollen und denen sie alle ihre menschlichen Beziehungen unterordnen. Beide haben ihr Studium aufgegeben und betreiben nun mit Versatzstücken aus Psychologie und Soziologie Marktanalysen für eben jene Konsumindustrie, deren exemplarische Zielgruppe sie bilden. Getrieben von der Frage, auf welche Art jenes den anderen offenbar so reichlich zur Verfügung stehende Geld zu beschaffen sei, verlieren sie sich immer tiefer in den »Gefängnissen des Überflusses«, nicht ohne jedoch einen Ausbruch zu wagen… Perecs Erzählung verbindet literarischen Formwillen mit wacher Gesellschaftsanalyse, schonungslose Beschreibung mit großer Empathie: Literatur als Utopie jenseits aller Tristesse konformer und kristalliner Warenwelten.

Inspired by Georges Perec's musings on reading, which he likens to "a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs", Simon Morris' latest book sets exactly those feral avians to work on the very surface of Perec's celebrated text "Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline". In the process he puts pressure on all of the terms in Perec's title: what does it mean to engage a text physically — looking at print, flipping pages, processing language, vocalizing, responding — without any of the social practices or semantics we usually associate with "reading." Or, to put this as Wittgenstein might: what activities still embody a grammar of reading even in the absence of what would seem to be its defining features. Moreover, Pigeon Reader intervenes as a precise facsimile edition of Perec's book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin books, 1997), with only the single chapter on reading modified. Pigeon Reader is thus also a kind of inversion, as well as an intervention: where British copyright laws permit copying 5% of a book, Morris has copied 95%. In reprinting the book to this extent, Morris' conviction has gone beyond the recent tradition of the artists' insert. Within the paratext he has corrupted the corporate branding, with penguins morphing into pigeons and advertisements re-imagined. One could be forgiven for asking why someone would remake an entire book just to make a conceptual play in a single chapter. Morris would likely respond by further appropriating and recontextualizing Perec's closing words from "Reading": "These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them."

"Georges Perec, employing prose meditations, lists, and inventories (of countries of origin, of what the immigrants carried), conjures up in Ellis Island the sixteen million people who, between 1890 and 1954, arrived as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet; his mother perished in Auschwitz) is wide-awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: "To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere... Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up." Ellis Island is a slender Perec masterwork, unique among his many singular works. The acclaimed poet and scholar Mónica de la Torre contributes an afterword that keeps Perec's writing front and center while situating Ellis Island in the context of current fierce battles over immigration"--