Portrait Of A Man

Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: "I'll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I'll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk." An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is - in the words of David Bellos, the "faithful exegete" who brought it to light - "connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create - but it's not like anything else that he wrote".

Product details

• Authors: Georges Perec, Perec Georges
• Assisted by: David Bellos (Translation), Bellos David (Translation)
• Publisher: Quercus Publishing
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.10.2016
• EAN: 9781782060963
• ISBN: 978-1-78206-096-3
• No. of pages: 176
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 197 mm x 11 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; France, HISTORY / Europe / France, Fiction in translation, TRAVEL / Europe / France, ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), History of art / art & design styles, TRUE CRIME / Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions, Forgery, falsification & theft of artworks