Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, photographed in May 2014, forty years after Perec’s observational exercise. Photo: David McSpadden, 2014. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Image source
Nothing happened today is a slightly suspicious sentence. It usually means nothing happened that has yet volunteered to become a story.
In October 1974, Georges Perec spent three days observing the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris records the less celebrated business of the square: buses, passers-by, dogs, changes in the weather. The sort of material a grand account of Paris might clear out of the way before beginning.
The restriction is appealing. Stay here. Write down what passes. There is no requirement to go looking for an extraordinary person having an extraordinary afternoon. A bus is allowed to be a bus, even if another one has already featured.
It also quietly changes the problem of writing. Instead of asking whether a day was interesting enough to deserve a page, you have to choose which of its countless small things to notice. That is still a choice. A list can be as revealing about the person making it as a carefully arranged anecdote.
Perec’s title leaves itself a useful escape route: an attempt. The square will continue after the notebook closes. Someone else will walk past, the light will move, and the buses, with very little regard for literary structure, will keep coming.
