Georges Perec , was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentarist, and essayist . Perec is a great storyteller and a wry humorist. There is always a point in reading his work. But the sense that these narratives are going nowhere, or chasing themselves around into oblivion, is the aesthetic that lies behind almost everything he wrote. He wrote plays, poetry, essays, film-scripts, opera librettos, and may other texts which confound traditional generic categories.
’The Street’, it is a chapter from the book ’Species from spaces’ beautifully expressed by Georges. This chapter portrays the lightest of touch, making things seem vibrant on the streets that we tend to ignore. Perec proves through his writing about his ‘not so ordinary ’ sight .Behind all the lightness and humor, there is also the sadness of a French Jewish boy who lost his parents in the Second world war and found comfort in the material world around him, and above all in writing.
This chapter very much gives you the sense of balance or correlation with the surrounding around you. It describes the gutter, the pavements, the relation or the bonding between people passing by, street lights, construction of buildings, homes of people etc. There were a few eye catching lines which made the text more readable and less dull ; for example , “ two blind people , holding one another by arm “ . This statement shows how Perec is being able to feel the bond between two blind people or rather he is able to describe relation between two people as he lost his loved ones at a very young age.
He tends to write what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colorless… shops, gutter , building, payments, etc. he makes e an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. If we still haven’t looked at anything, we’ve merely picked out what we’ve long ago picked out. Which changed my perspective of observing my surroundings.
“Nothing other than the record of a threefold experience of ageing : of the places themselves , of my memories , and of my writing . “