Lost Perec Manuscript Discovered

Until recently, Perec aficionados knew that there was one book that they couldn't possibly have read, until now: Portrait of a Man. Perec completely divulged the truth of the early, unpublished manuscript's existence, throughout the course of his lifetime, and yet, after he died, fans of his writing simply could not find it. Learn more about this impossible manuscript's discovery at The Guardian:

Georges Perec never made a secret of having written an unpublished early novel about Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man, but after his death in 1982, the manuscript of Le Condottière couldn’t be found. On leaving his perch in Paris’s Latin Quarter for a larger apartment in 1966, Perec had stuffed old paperwork into a suitcase for the dump, and put his manuscripts in a similar case. The wrong one got junked, and all Perec’s early writings disappeared. Or so he thought.

When I was tracking down everyone who had known Perec during his tragically short life, I called on a journalist who had met him at a writer’s retreat in Normandy. He mentioned that someone had once given him one of Perec’s pieces to look at. He went to a wardrobe and pulled out a manuscript. There it was, a carbon-copy typescript beginning: “georges perec le condottière roman”. I stayed up that night reading Perec’s lost novel. It was really hard to follow – maybe the late hour, the smudgy carbon and the dim hotel lighting were to blame. But even after a night’s sleep, in good light and clear print, Portrait of a Man is quite strange. It is connected by a hundred threads to every part of Perec’s later oeuvre, but it’s not like anything else he wrote. [...]

Readers take note! The manuscript is slated for publication this week by MacLehose Press. More news in greater detail at The Guardian.