‘Je me souviens’ de Georges Perec

Description

A short introductory note to Je me souviens explains that the title, form, and, to a certain extent, spirit of these texts were inspired by Joe Brainard’s I remember. Each of the 480 pieces collected here — most just a single sentence — is written: “Je me souviens …” (“I remember …”), and they consist of short “souvenirs” — personal and shared memories, the small (and large) things that are incidental in life, momentarily significant and then often practically (but not entirely) lost.

They range from the utterly banal and everyday (“Je me souviens des trous dans les tickets de méro” (“I remember the holes in the Métro tickets”)) to any number of people (from musicians to Yury Gagarin to “Christine Keeler et de l’affaire Profumo”) to movies, periodicals, and books (“Je me souviens de How to be an alien et de How to scrape skies, de Georges Mikes”).

In a brief afterword Perec explains that most of the memories come from when he was between the ages of ten and twenty-five (though there are a few more recent ones scattered in). Not everything, he admits, is correctly recalled — but then that’s the way memory works, distorting over time.