Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.
Required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of this modern master -- Andrew Motion Observer As a witty attack on consumerism Things is as much a parable of the Nineties as it is a story of the Sixties Sunday Times Perec's first novel is a masterpiece of elegaic mockery Financial Times Things, Perec's first novel, is an innovative, perceptive and even moving study of corrosive consumerism Independent [A Man Asleep is] grimly obsessing...one turns the pages with unlikely fascination -- Euan Cameron Sunday Telegraph