Thoughts of Sorts by Georges Perec

Perec, one of my favourite authors and only a relatively recent discovery, was an inveterate scribbler and seemed to be publishing articles and short pieces all over the place, as well as writing his novels (and holding down a day job!). After his early death in 1982, a collection of his shorter works was put together under the title of “Thoughts of Sorts” and it’s available in a number of editions. Mine, however, is a beautiful little Notting Hill Editions clothbound hardback, translated by his biographer David Bellos, and reading it recently was a joy!

thoughts sorts

I was in a Perec kind of mood anyway, having been delighted with the recently published “Portrait of a Man” (kindly sent by MacLehose Press) and this seemed the ideal dipping into kind of volume – which it was! TOS collects a miscellany of essays and short pieces, all different but all bearing the distinctive imprint of Perec’s mind. Some read simply like lists; some are autobiographical; some take a seemingly straightforward subject like spectacles and run away with it! All are curious, fascinating and mentally stimulating.

I’d read a few of the pieces before, in the collection “Species of Space”, but it was a delight to experience them all together, in a lovely volume with an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble. One of my favourites is “Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books” which covers the kind of issues all of us booklovers experience regularly:

“Torn between these two poles, the right to be laid-back, easy-going and anarchic, and the virtue of a clean state, the steely efficiency of the great clear-out, you always end up trying to sort out your book collection. It’s a nerve-wracking, depressing operation which can nevertheless bring pleasant surprises, such as when you find a book you had forgotten you had from not having seen it for so long and, putting off to the morrow what can’t be done today, you lie flat on your bed and re-read it from cover to cover.”

Another, perhaps more profound, essay called “Backtracking” covers the experience of undergoing analysis, which Perec himself did over a period of years. Given his upbringing it’s perhaps no surprise that he needed this. “Reading” is a little study of how we physically read and, like all Perec’s work, it takes a seemingly surface level subject and somehow manages to end up being a quite profound and revealing exposition of the subject at hand – I don’t quite know how he does it.

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This book is most certainly the perfect introduction to Perec’s shorter works, giving examples of most of the styles he used. As for sorting out your thoughts – well, this collections of thoughts of sorts won’t necessarily do that, but it certainly will stimulate a lot of new thought! 🙂