Monday, May 20, 2019


A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

"The Page", "The Bed", "The Bedroom", "The Apartment" -- the first four chapters of Georges Perec's Espèces d'espaces (1974), also known as Species of Spaces (in English).

Perec likens a page to a bed and a bed to a page. The epigram for the "Bed" chapter is a play on Proust's A la recherche de temps perdu (1913): "For a long time I went to bed early." But instead of Proust, it is Parcel Mroust: "For a long time I went to bed in writing."

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