Kondottiären

Re-reading this 8 years later now that the Swedish edition is out. Still not a great Perec novel, still gets lost in its own existentilizin', but reading it in the midst of the GenAI debate is interesting. What good an artist who can only copy, but can't find anything new to say? The perfect copy that is useless precisely because it doesn't add anything that the original artist didn't already put in there.

Perec's unpublished debut novel isn't great in any way, but what's interesting is that it seems to be about exactly that. Gaspard Winckler (he'd reuse the name in his last masterpiece 20 years later) is a forger who, after years of creating copies of great artworks, gets it into his head to create a copy which is also a great masterpiece on its own terms - his masterpiece as an artist and a forger. This is, in a pre-post-modernist view, impossible. So he kills his boss and tunnels out of the basement he's been working in.

Perec worked on this for years, eventually finishing the last rewrite by writing ENDENDENDEND and telling his publisher he wouldn't change another word if he didn't get a LOT more money. When he didn't, he declared that it wouldn't be published until it was found years after his death. It wasn't published until it was found years after his death.

Portrait of a Man seems to be a novel with heavy existentialist and Borgesian influences that has its own failure as its central metaphor. There are hints of the author Perec would become - the occasional wordplay, the conflict between the real and the artificial (which he'd do a lot better in a lot fewer words in A Gallery Portrait and The Winter Journey)... but for all that it gets right, it's messy and badly paced; the POV changes constantly for no particular reason, and once the central point of the novel becomes clear (especially if you read the foreword first), there's still about half the novel to go with no particular development.