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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris | Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal
1 post | 7 read | 2 to read
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the Humdrum, the nonevent the everyday---"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locate was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes: the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythin, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin
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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris | Georges Perec, Marc Lowenthal
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A fascinating small book about three days of the infraordinary sitting in the same square, Place Saint Sulpice recording everything the author saw, from the simple to the unusual to the ordinary (lots and lots of ordinary). At first I was unsure, it felt like a list but over those three days I began to “see” this part of Paris in a very different way. Quite an extraordinary little book.

charl08 Sounds fascinating. 5y
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