{"id":5306,"date":"2013-07-09T16:50:32","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T20:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=5306"},"modified":"2013-07-09T16:50:32","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T20:50:32","slug":"la-boutique-obscure-124-dreams-by-georges-perectranslated-by-daniel-levin-beckermelville-house-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/la-boutique-obscure-124-dreams-by-georges-perectranslated-by-daniel-levin-beckermelville-house-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges PerecTranslated by Daniel Levin BeckerMelville House, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

La Boutique Obscure<\/em> is Georges Perec’s dream journal, a record of 124 dreams from the period from May 1968 to August 1972, complete with an index (which is well worth reading: it’s got entries like “Fictitious names (?)” and “Retracing the same path” and “Remembering and forgetting” and “Dreaming about dreaming, or about waking up, or about being convinced that you’re not dreaming, or waking up relieved” (246-254)). The dreams range in length from several pages to less than a page: a sentence or a fragment, or, in one case, an absence: the entirety of one dream, “The window,” is its title, the month\/year Perec dreamed it, and then the lacuna “\/ \/” – Perec’s sign, in this book, for an intentional omission (178).<\/p>\n

I like this book (which was originally published in French in 1973 by Éditions Denoël, and only published in English translation last year) for how it captures the simultaneous oddness and ordinariness of dreams, the weirdness of dream-logic, dream language. Perec even tries to capture what’s forgotten: “the greater or lesser size of the gap between paragraphs” within a dream “is meant to correspond to the greater or lesser importance of passages that were forgotten or indecipherable upon waking” (2). There are places where the typography reflects how a moment in a dream can feel either unclear or clear but overlapping: like the sentence “Regardless of your mode of transport, you have to pay a tax to get [ ] San Francisco,” where what’s between those brackets (which aren’t in the book) is the text “a room in” and also the text “out of” – layered on top of one another like the top and bottom halves of a fraction, without the dividing line (127). Some of the dreams were noteworthy to me for their subject matter, for being about things I don’t dream about: police, concentration camps, war. (In his afterword, Daniel Levin Becker notes that “Perec’s mother disappeared in the early 1940s, most likely at Auschwitz” (261) —so right: it’s not surprising that things that seem distant to me were closer to Perec.)<\/p>\n

The dreams have some really satisfying images and moments of humor. I like this, from “The arrest”:<\/p>\n

I am in Tunis. It is a vertically sprawling city. I’m on a very long walk: winding roads, lines of trees, fences, panoramas. It’s as if the whole landscape turned out to be the background of an Italian painting. (26)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or this, from “The plasterer”:<\/p>\n

Shouts are heard: Niki! Niki! Niki! Niki arrives with her seventeen dogs, who jump on me and nearly knock me over, but then they prove affectionate and frisky. (60)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some dreams are like poems, like this one, “The stone bridge”:<\/p>\n

A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river.<\/p>\n

A signal sign indicates the name of the place:<\/p>\n

( Y O U )<\/p>\n

In parentheses. (67)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La Boutique Obscure is Georges Perec’s dream journal, a record of 124 dreams from the period from May 1968 to August 1972, complete with an index (which is well worth reading: it’s got entries like “Fictitious names (?)” and “Retracing the same path” and “Remembering and forgetting” and “Dreaming about dreaming, or about waking up, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}