A few more procedural notes. Typographical irregularities — errant periods, open parentheses that never close, other such sources of dull anguish — are present in Perec’s original (and if it seems strange to you that a punctuation mark should have as much emotional weight as the word “mother,” I’m frankly not sure what you’re doing reading Perec.) Titles of Perec’s works are given in their English translations, though this should not be construed as a claim that any Perec text in translation is truly equivalent to its original counterpart. For more on those originals, and much more on the circumstances that inspired many of these dreams, I commend to the curious reader Bellos’s Georges Perec: A Life in Words. Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking E.R., N.R., I.M., F.F., and R.D. for their various forms of help in making the preceding just slightly less obscure.
La Boutique Obscure is not a harder book for a translator than A Void, certainly, but neither is it altogether easier: intellectually, at least, it’s much more straightforward to recreate a novel without the letter E than it is to intuit the subconscious logic and illogic of a man who at one point in his life chose to write a novel without the letter E, and was even known to spend an evening here or there eliding it from conversation. But, again, Perec’s value isn’t about straightforwardness: it’s about the work he did to put his self into writing, and the work that we as readers get to do to extract it. In the best of his books, that work goes on well after the translation stops. I hope that’s the case here, and that it’s as much a labor of love for you as it was for me.