"'murky', 'obscure', 'hazy', 'hallucinatory', 'difficult', 'frustrating','incomprehensible', 'intriguing'"
-Publisher's Weekly
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Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 5
date: Jun 01, 2009
The fifth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.
It would be hard to overstate the impact the writings of Georges Perec have had on my work. Whether in his increasingly unsettling debut Things, his pamphlet sized cabinet of wonders, A Portrait Gallery, or in his masterwork, a book Warren Motte has put forward as perhaps the greatest work in French of the 20th century, Life: A User’s Manual, there is much in Perec to stun and refresh. Ray of the Star opens with an epigraph from Perec’s novella A Man Asleep (trans. by Andrew Leak): “Now you must learn how to last.” My protagonist, Harry Tichborne, enacts the inverse of Perec’s man and his gradual move into Bartelby-esque stasis, but the shoe of existential melancholia is always threatening to drop back on him. Or maybe the boot.
