SOURCE: "The Sense of An Ending," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4678, November 27, 1992, p. 25.

In the following review, Taylor notes the influences of Stendhal and his novel La Chartreuse de Parma, on Perec's unfinished mystery 53 Days.

There is something poignant about the elaborate narrative structure of 53 Days, the novel on which Georges Perec was working at the time of his death from lung cancer in 1982. Racing against time (the title refers to the fifty-three days it took Stendhal to dictate La Chartreuse de Parme), Perec builds this increasingly paranoiac literary thriller into an intricate labyrinth of "nested narratives". Indeed, one of the seemingly insoluble murder stories making up the maze of tales involves a manuscript entitled The Crypt, which, like Perec's master novel, has been left unfinished; in any case, it mysteriously concludes with a blank page. Perec was able to draft only eleven of twenty-eight planned chapters, but...