About this ebook
'I remember Hermes handbags, with their tiny padlocks.'
'I remember that Stendhal liked spinach.'
'I remember that I dreamed of one day having all 57 varieties of Heinz.'
Georges Perec's I Remember is both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring new form of memoir, now translated by his peers in wordsmithery, Philip Terry and David Bellos, with an introduction by Bellos.
In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia.
As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.
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About the author
Georges Perec, born in Paris in 1936, was a pioneering French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. Orphaned from an early age, many of his works deal with absence, loss and identity, often through word play. He later became an eminent member of the experimental Oulipo group. He died in 1982.
Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante's Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish, which refracts his experience of working with migrants in Sicily with Stories in Transit. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret's The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022. His version of Dante's Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024 - "A Dante like no other" (London Review Bookshop).
David Bellos was a British academic and translator, who founded Princeton University's translation programme. He translated much of Perec's work into English and his biography, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, was published in 1993.
