"Sphinx" by Anne Garréta (Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan & Introduction by Daniel Levin Becker)

ISBN: 978-1-941920-09-1 Deep Vellum

"Sphinx" by Anne Garréta (Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan; Introduction by Daniel Levin Becker)   Deep Vellum

A really nice mood piece of writing here.  Anne Garréta gives the nighttime life of Paris and Manhattan a nice smokey touch, as this is a tale of lovers, one is a combination of professor and DJ, and the other lover is an American dancer in Paris.  What we don't know is the gender of either of the two.   Which must have been hell for the translator Emma Ramadan to do, since the French language has very strong genderistic touches to their language.   In all honesty, as I was reading, I was imagining that the lovers were women, and I'm not sure if it was just a stupid knowledge of knowing the author is female, or somehow the nature of the two main characters.   Garréta wrote this novel when she was 25, and she became a member of Oulipo five years after she wrote "Sphinx."   One can sense the playfulness of the language as well as the no gender specific of the two characters, but it's not as experimental as Georges Perec for instance.  The story reads as a doomed love story, a very smart and textured text, but one that conveys the loss of a presence.  

- Tosh Berman

"la boutique obscure: 124 Dreams" by Georges Perec (translated by Daniel Levin Becker)

Dream diaries are usually only interesting between the person who is having that dream and their doctor.  Beyond that when someone comes up to you and says "I have a dream and its..."  Well, your first thought is to run away.   But alas what we have here is a dream book by the great Georges Perec, and even though it is his dreams... it's still not that interesting.

The best and greatest dream book is Michel Leiris' "Nights as Day Days as Night."  Actually one of my favorite all-time books and for god's sake it's a dream journal.  But Leiris maybe a more twisted character than Perec, and not as conceptual.   So "la boutique obscure: 124 Dreams" starts in 1968 and ends in 1972,  probably the most fruitful of his writing years.  I imagine that he started this project with a beginning and an ending -perhaps taking over the role of an actual everyday journal.  But i am just guessing here; what we do have is little narratives by Perec, which shows his dream world is very straight forward in a sense.  At least one gets the sense that there is a beginning, middle part and then end.  Like Godard, not always in that order, but there is a sense of some sort of organization within the Perec dream world.    Leiris on the other hand is more sexual (and there is sex in the Perec dream world) and a tad wilder.  Also his imagery is more poetic and seductive of sorts.  Perec is sort of listing his dreams for maybe a future analysis.

But the best part of the book for me is the end index, where he list categories like "Staircases" and the color "Red" for instance - and he mentions how many times he had a dream with the color red in it and so forth.  Which comes to mind on my own writing project, which is not about dreams, but I am writing something that is very systematic, and I realize that some of that came from Perec and his work.  So, yeah its interesting but mostly for the writing process than anything else.

"Many Subtle Channels" by Daniel Levin Becker

Superb book that is both the history and the explanation of the great literary group OULIPO. Daniel Levn Becker, the author, actually became an official member of the OULIPO, and it's with great humor and appreciation of these rather 'eccentric' characters that make up this group that are obsessed with word games and how those games turn into literature.

When I first picked up the book I thought it maybe a very dry look or approach to OULIPO, but alas, it is anything but. "Many Subtle Channels" is a personal look into the works of Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews, Jacques Roubaud and others. What sounds like party games is actually a deeply involvement with literature and how it works. But done with great humor and wit. An important book on its subject matter, but also a great read.

"Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt.  Interviewing members of Oulupo.

Oulupo at work

Georges Perec

Raymond Queneau

Jacques Roubaud