Georges Perec
The many beautiful, complex books of the acclaimed French author Georges Perec (1936–1982) include Life: A User’s Manual, A Void, W: Or the Memory of Childhood, Things: A Story of the Sixties, A Man Asleep, and 53 Days.
While exploring the island—its history, its buildings, its leftovers—Perec identifies Ellis Island as a non-place, an isle of tears, and reveals Emma Lazarus’s metaphor of America’s ‘golden door,’ which is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, to be little but a false promise.
The many beautiful, complex books of the acclaimed French author Georges Perec (1936–1982) include Life: A User’s Manual, A Void, W: Or the Memory of Childhood, Things: A Story of the Sixties, A Man Asleep, and 53 Days.
While exploring the island—its history, its buildings, its leftovers—Perec identifies Ellis Island as a non-place, an isle of tears, and reveals Emma Lazarus’s metaphor of America’s ‘golden door,’ which is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, to be little but a false promise.
The lyric study of Ellis Island is a mournful counterfactual about what might have been had his parents—and many others—made it across the ocean. If Perec took pride in not repeating himself, it did not stop him from returning, as if in an elliptical orbit, to the same obsessions: police states, citizens going missing, organized brutality, human fragility