Nací

This book deals with one of the themes that obsessed Georges Perec, and on which he built an important part of his fascinating literature: memory. The texts gathered here evoke and list memories, both personal (his birth, a childhood escapade at the age of eleven through the streets of post-war Paris, a parachute jump that he remembers while drunk during a meeting of writers...) as collectives (Jewish emigration to the United States, linked to his book and film project on Ellis Island). There are also in these pages dreams and reflections on real and fictional memories, on how they are born and how we articulate them, as well as notes on projects that were on Perec's mind, which he tells the editor Maurice Nadeau about in a letter, and one of those lists that he and other OuLiPo members were so fond of. The one included here lists thirty-seven things the author wants to do before he dies, including visiting the Prado Museum, drinking rum from a bottle rescued from the bottom of the sea like Captain Haddock, learning the printer's trade, writing a science fiction novel, getting drunk with Malcolm Lowry, meeting Nabokov...