Portrait of a Man Read Free Page B

is a slight change in the order of the clauses; but in others, I felt I had to take the sentence apart and put it back together in a different shape. Later on, Perec got a better grip on the art of the multiply nested sentence: his investigation of all the things you can do with an X in
W or The Memory of Childhood
(p. 72), like the 17-line description of the background of the 439th puzzle that Bartlebooth has just failed to complete in the last chapter of
Life A User’s Manual
(p. 494) – require careful attention for translation into English, but don’t need to be recast. The convoluted multi-clause sentences of
Portrait of a Man
are more like exercises preparing Perec for greater exploits to come.
    What’s disconcerting is the rejection of a single narrative voice. Winckler “talks” in Part I in the first, second and third persons, alternating between them according to no perceptible plan or logic. This intentional instability may be what Gallimard’s rejection letter meant to refer to when it cited “excessive clumsiness and chatter” in the text, but there’s no doubt that some members of its distinguished panel of readers really didn’t like Perec’s taste for puns in a serious novel about an art forger’s crisis of conscience.
    In
Les Misérables
, Victor Hugo described puns as
la fiente de l’esprit
, “the guano of the mind”. Most people think he meant to deride word games as intellectual waste, but a few who respect the esteem in which the great author held human excrement (Valjean’s famous escape through the sewers is preceded by a serious proposalto recycle the shit of Paris as fertiliser) believe that he really meant to say that puns
enrich
the mind’s loam. Perec was of the second persuasion, without any doubt. In daily life and in his literary work, Perec was an incessant player of word games, and he coined some of the most memorable puns in the French language. In
Portrait of A Man
, he drops in a few that oblige the translator to compete. What they’re doing here is in one respect quite obvious. Bewildering though they may have been to his first readers, Perec’s verbal quips have become the most recognisable part of his first finished portrait of himself.
    David Bellos
Princeton, December 2013

For Jacques Lederer

Like many men, I have made my descent into Hell, and, like some, I have more or less returned from it.
    MICHEL LEIRIS ,
Manhood
    And, in the first place, I will recall to my mind the things I have hitherto held as true, because perceived by the senses, and the foundations upon which my belief in their truth rested; I will, in the second place, examine the reasons that afterward constrained me to doubt of them; and, finally, I will consider what of them I ought now to believe.
    DESCARTES ,
Meditations

I

    Madera was heavy. I grabbed him by the armpits and went backwards down the stairs to the laboratory. His feet bounced from tread to tread in a staccato rhythm that matched my own unsteady descent, thumping and banging around the narrow stairwell. Our shadows danced on the walls. Blood was still flowing, all sticky, seeping from the soaking wet towel, rapidly forming drips on the silk lapels, then disappearing into the folds of the jacket, like trails of slightly glinting snot side-tracked by the slightest roughness in the fabric, sometimes accumulating into drops that fell to the floor and exploded into star-shaped stains. I let him slump at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the laboratory door, and then went back up to fetch the razor and to mop up the bloodstains before Otto returned. But Otto came in by the other door at almost the same time as I did. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. I beat a retreat, ran down the stairs, and shut myself in the laboratory. I padlocked the door and jammed the wardrobe up against it. He came down a few minutes later, tried to force the door open, to no avail, then went