La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams
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Authors: Georges Perec
“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”
—Italo Calvino
“It will be impossible for us to think of contemporary French writing in the same way again.”
—Paul Auster
“The finest French writer of the twentieth century.”
—
Context
“The genius of Perec [is] to marry a deeply human melancholy with dazzling formal experiments.”
—
The Guardian
“Wonderful and extraordinary writings.”
—The London Review of Books
“Fiendishly clever.”
—
Times Literary Supplement
“Perec’s artistry has achieved a perfect balance between allure and imponderability.”
—
The Los Angeles Times
La Boutique Obscure
Copyright © 1973, 1998, Éditions Denoël, Paris
Translation and Afterword copyright © 2012, Daniel Levin Becker
Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis. / This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
eISBN: 978-1-61219-176-8
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
for Nour
since I think
that the real
is in no way real
how am I to believe
that dreams are dreams
Jacques Roubaud and Saigyō Hōshi
Everyone has dreams. Some remember theirs, far fewer recount them, and very few write them down. Why write them down, anyway, knowing you will only sell them out (and no doubt sell yourself out in the process)?
I thought I was recording the dreams I was having; I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.
These dreams—overdreamed, overworked, overwritten—what could I then expect of them, if not to make them into texts, a bundle of texts left as an offering at the gates of that “royal road” I still must travel with my eyes open?
Insofar as I have sought some degree of homogeneity in the transcription and then the composition of these dreams, it seems worth giving a few specifications on their typography and formatting:
—a paragraph break corresponds to a change in time, place, feeling, mood, etc., felt as such within the dream;
—the use of italics, which is rare, indicates a particularly striking element of the dream;
—the greater or lesser size of the gap between paragraphs is meant to correspond to the greater or lesser importance of passages that were forgotten or indecipherable upon waking;