author : The Oulipo

The Oulipo is comprised mainly of French writers who are interested in exploiting “constraints” in literature (Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de litt&eactute;rature potentielle which means, roughly, Workshop for Potential Literature). Its members have included luminaries of the calibre of Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Queneau… but it was Perec who perhaps became its most celebrated practitioner. The present volume includes, and then extends Perec’s brief parable. Over two decades his fellow Oulipians have written twenty sequels to this tale, between 1992 and January of this year. It turns out to be a story resonant with possibilities, and the result is a sort of “hyper-novel”, a novel of digressions, gradual elaboration and bizarre forays into the totally unexpected. Winter Journeys has grown to become one of the most extended and congenial literary experiments of recent times, and includes meditations on the literary tastes of worms, book-burning in the Nazi period, the delights of plagiarism and the twisted rationality of bibliophilia. It is also a monument to the friendship, ingenuity and collective creativity of this uniquely long-lived group of writers.