The Afterlives of a Writer

When Perec died in 1982 he had published only 17 books and around 50 shorter pieces in periodicals and collective volumes. Over the past thirty years a dozen more books under Perec’s name have appeared—an unfinished novel, collections of published and unpublished articles and exercises, and in fine, a previously unpublished work written in youth and which the author himself believed lost. The ‘Perec corpus’ that we now read is therefore substantially larger and rather different from what Perec himself could have conceptualized as his contribution to literature. This chapter describes the evolution of the corpus over the last thirty years and seeks to understand what the ‘afterlife’ of a modern writer consists of—not just in terms of reception, use and appropriation, but in the very dynamic of retrospective publication.