L’ultimo capolavoro dell’autore di La vita istruzioni per l’uso. “La mattina di giovedì 2 aprile 1914, Hermann Raffke fu trovato morto. Le sue esequie si celebrarono otto giorni dopo, secondo un protocollo che egli stesso aveva descritto con precisione nel proprio testamento e che sembrava prolungare in una maniera un po’ macabra alcune analisi di Lester Nowak. Il suo corpo, imbalsamato dal miglior tassidermista del momento, fatto venire espressamente dal Messico, fu rivestito con quella stessa vestaglia grigia con il colletto bordato di rosso che indossava nel quadro di Kürz e piazzato nella stessa poltrona su cui aveva posato. Dopo di che, poltrona e cadavere vennero fatti discendere in una tomba che riproduceva con fedeltà, ma su scala sensibilmente ridotta, la stanza dove Raffke teneva i quadri preferiti.” Pittsburgh 1913. La comunità tedesca organizza una grande esposizione in occasione dei venticinque anni del regno dell’imperatore Guglielmo II. Tra le numerose manifestazioni c’è la mostra di un collezionista, tal Hermann Raffke. La mostra, che dapprima sembra passare inosservata, comincia ad avere un sempre più crescente successo, dovuto a un solo enigmatico quadro. Il dipinto raffigura il collezionista fra le sue opere, intento a osservare un quadro che lo ritrae nella stessa situazione, come in un gioco di specchi all’infinito. Tuttavia, a un attento esame, si scopre che in ognuna di queste riproduzioni c’è un particolare diverso: si scatena così una gigantesca caccia per individuare le varianti che porterà a un’incredibile scoperta...
Author
Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy. Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965. In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants. Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)". Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'. His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e"). W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained. Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery. David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
