An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Long neglected by English-speaking scholars and Perec devotees for the author's other, more flamboyant endeavors, An Attempt... has remained a kind of secret treasure for those interested in Oulipo- and Situationist-inspired tracts of Paris. Marvelously simple and deceptively well-designed, Perec's slim volume presents itself as an artifact of the street, ushering the reader into a spontaneous phenomenology of words, conventional symbols, numbers, fleeting slogans, trajectories, colors, and, as he more technically describes them, means of locomotion, means of carrying, means of traction, degrees of determination or motivation, and body positions. --Erik Morse, bookforum.com, Sept. 24, 2010