I told you I got book obsessions, didn’t I?? And so here is more about Perec. I felt the need to read more of his work after “Species of Space” and this little volume had arrived at the same time:

art

So, what’s it about and what’s so special? Well, this is what it says on the back:

art back(Sorry for the lopsided scan)

And that’s no word of a lie. There are no full stops and no capitalisation and the only punctuation I think was dashes. You’d think that 84 pages of that would be hard to read, but amazingly it isn’t – Perec’s brilliantly constructed the rhythm of the book so that it reads easily! It’s like a kind of flow chart with options translated into text and it’s clever and also very, very funny! So the poor man being advised has to contend with all the possibilities that might come up on such a chart (is it Friday? Yes. Is it in Lent? No. Has your boss swallowed a fish bone? etc etc) and goes round and round in circles like you can on these things, as your life ticks away.

I shan’t say any more about this except that it’s utterly brilliant, Perec was a genius and this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. ‘Nuff said!