“THE EYE, FIRST OF ALL…”

An Interview with Perec Scholar and Translator David Bellos

Georges Perec’s most revered tomes, palindromes, lipograms and dérives will always share an association with the French author’s membership in the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or “workshop of potential literature”) beginning in the mid-1960s. But the recent publication of Perec’s first, “lost” novel, Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere some fifty-five years after its completion, reveals a precocious, but protean, aspect to his work. The then-impecunious Latin Quarter office worker and discharged paratrooper—whom French scholar and perennial, Perec translator David Bellos refers to as “Perec before Perec”—was contracted in 1959 by Gallimard to complete the one hundred and fifty page manuscript under the working title Gaspard pas mort.

With nearly three years of writing, rewriting and revisions invested in the text, Perec ultimately abandoned Il Condottiere when the publisher refused to continue with the project. As the popular fable of Perec goes, the suddenly celebrated author of Things: A Story of the Sixties accidentally disposed of all copies of Il Condottiere and numerous correspondences some years later when success allowed him to move apartments. While a brief reference in his autobiographical W, or Memories of Childhood notated its provenance, Perec’s unexpected death in 1982 appeared to ensure its complete disappearance.

The plot of Il Condottiere follows ambitious protagonist Gaspard Winckler’s failed attempt to counterfeit the titular portrait of a medieval warlord by 15th century Italian painter Antonello de Messina to murderous consequences.  The horrible act itself, occurring just out of frame of the narrative, forces Winckler to parse the complex motivations (or lack thereof) that preceded his crime. This vaguely Camusian tale of death and forgery, with a soupcon of Poe-inspired psychotopology (Winckler is locked in a basement for more than half of the text), finds Perec dabbling in a turgid, modernist narrative of the alienated artist unchained by an inexplicable act of violence.  As Bellos writes in the book’s introduction, with a narrative absorbed in the bipolarity of authenticity and the counterfeit, Winckler’s desire “to achieve the impossible feat of creating a real masterpiece that will be recognised (and therefore purchased) as a genuine Antonello… produces an authentic image of his own true self—an evasive, indeterminate fraud of no fixed identity.”  The voluble self-interrogation dominating the majority of the narrative proceeds along a narrow thread that stitches together the false artist and the true criminal.

Through Bellos’ exhaustive research—his translation of Life: A User’s Manual and colossal biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words effectively introduced Perec to English speakers—carbon copies of Il Condottiere were unearthed beginning in...