SOURCE: "Pretzel," in London Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 3, February 2, 1989, pp. 15-17.

In the following review, Ford briefly summarizes several of Perec's works. He then provides a comparison of Perec's personal history to the events in W, or, the Memory of Childhood.

These are the first of Georges Perec's wonderful and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first and most popular novel, Les Choses (1965), which still sells twenty thousand copies a year. Les Choses describes, with a sociological exactitude justified in the novel's concluding quotation from Marx, the motivations and disappointments of an utterly ordinary middle-class couple in a consumerist culture. Sylvie and Jérôme are both public opinion analysts, as indeed was Perec at the time; they emerge as a kind of generically rootless Parisian couple of the Sixties, whose experiences...