A review by affiknittyreads
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec

A book like this sort of defies reviewing or rating. Is it an essay? Is it a historical document? Is it a list? Answer: yes. I can’t remember what brought this book to my attention, possibly a listicle of French books somewhere. In any case, I was intrigued by the idea and also suspected that it might make me feel as though I had enjoyed a little bit of Paris, a place I really miss. Over the course of three days, beginning on October 18, 1974 (which also happens to have been my sister’s fourth birthday), Perec sits in the Place Saint-Sulpice and attempts to note everything he sees happening there. Lots of pigeons, pedestrians, shopping bags, automobiles. Friends who happen to walk by and say hello are catalogued. Each of the buses that passes is recorded by number. Marc Lowenthal’s afterword draws the connection between this and Perec‘s mentor Raymond Queneau, who famously loved riding Paris buses and who featured an incident on a bus in his work Exercises in Style. (As an aside, the afterword did help me better appreciate the book, even if it sunk into self-indulgent melancholy at the end, haha.) Interestingly, as I learned from the afterword, Perec also wrote a work which was the inverse of this. Whereas this is 55 pages cataloguing everything that happens in one spot over the course of three days, his book Life A User’s Manual is 600 pages exhaustively detailing a single apartment building in Paris at one very specific moment in time (8AM on June 23, 1975). I’m not sure I have the stamina for that, but this was an interesting read that explored the fleeting nature of time and existence in a different way than some of the Japanese books I have been reading.