Moult choses nouvelles…

Perec had just returned from his trip to Belgrade, which prompted him to begin writing his first novel, L’Attentat de Sarajevo, announced here. He had high hopes for its publication. He replies to a card he has just received from his friend upon his return from Yugoslavia, “nearly a month late,” and proposes a meeting in the Huchette neighborhood. “I am writing with a pen (a Parker) that does not belong to me, on paper that I stole. The envelope is a theft and the stamps a petty fraud [sic] (…).”

“Moult choses nouvelles” (“Many new things”), he tells him: “military service in two months. Before then, a finished story, and I hope, in the process of being published, entitled ‘L’attentat de Sarajevo’ (for I have just returned from ФНPJ, that is, FNRJ, that is, Yugoslavia) etcetcetc…”

A rare witness to Georges Perec’s youth, Bernard Quilliet was his fellow student in the hypokhâgne class at the Lycée Henri-IV (class of 1954–55): “In class, Georges sat next to a ‘bica,’ that is, a student in his fourth year of preparatory studies at Saint-Cloud; his name was Bernard Quilliet, but he was called K. Like Georges, K. wanted to be a writer and intended to bring out his first masterpiece within the year (…).” (Bellos, p. 96). Setting literature aside, Quilliet would go on to become one of the foremost specialists of sixteenth-century France, professor emeritus of modern history at the Université Paris VIII. But his talent and taste for drawing — he won the Concours général in drawing in 1950 — led him and Perec to write Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Enzio, le petit roi de Sardaigne, a remarkable comic strip whose every illustration was based on an idea by Perec; in fact, this collaboration constitutes Georges Perec’s very first work of fiction (Cahier de l’Herne, 13–26, with the first page reproduced in Bellos, p. 97). Perec spent that year of hypokhâgne as a dilettante: last, 42nd out of 42, in philosophy, with an average grade below the required 10 out of 20, which led to him being politely informed on his third-term report that he would not be readmitted to Henri-IV.

That was the end of preparatory class, and Perec found himself at the Sorbonne. He would not wear out his trousers there for long: these two years were spent more in the cafés, cinemas and jazz clubs of the Latin Quarter. Nonetheless, from his very first year, thanks to his cousin Ela, he met a whole group of young Yugoslav students, with whom he formed close ties. As early as January 1956, he wrote a first short story, now lost, Les Errants. Then, at the end of the year, a second: Manderre. This text was dedicated to a new acquaintance from the Yugoslav group, Zoran Petrović, a young artist who had just arrived in Paris in November 1956: he was exhibiting works titled “Machines” at the Palais Berlitz (today the Galerie yougoslave); Perec, a regular visitor there, met the woman with whom he would fall in love and to whom he would, some time later, present this typescript: Milka Ćanak. The following summer she would become the character Mila in a text Perec announces here: L’Attentat de Sarajevo.

This novel — Perec’s first — was written following his stay in Belgrade, in the footsteps of Mila and her friends, who had invited him to discover the Yugoslav capital. Upon his return, he wrote L’Attentat in a matter of weeks.

“On 8 September, he was back in Paris. He met with M’Uzan on the 10th — before soon afterward breaking off his analysis. No sooner back than he was hastily writing a novel steeped in his Yugoslav experience: L’Attentat de Sarajevo. This was, literally, his first ‘fifty-three days.’ Just as Stendhal dictated La Chartreuse de Parme in fifty-two days, Perec dictated this book to a former schoolmate from the Lycée d’Étampes trained as a stenographer, Noëlla Menut. In fifty-three days? In any case very quickly, in little more than a month and a half, since by 20 December the text, submitted to Seuil (via Jean Duvignaud) and to Les Lettres nouvelles, had already been read by Jean Paris (at Seuil) and by Maurice Nadeau. As soon as it was rejected, L’Attentat de Sarajevo was set aside: ‘I may take it up again, but first I would rather spend at least a year exploring a new subject to its fullest.’ The new subject was the novel La Nuit, which would become Le Condottière. Perec later lost the typescript of L’Attentat: it was not found again until after his death.” (Claude Burgelin, preface to L’Attentat de Sarajevo, 2016).

This letter allows us to confirm, and even refine, the chronology of its composition: Perec returned on 8 September, and by the 25th of that month he tells Quilliet that the story — which already had its title — would soon be finished. This letter to Bernard Quilliet is notably the only one that mentions the ongoing writing of L’Attentat de Sarajevo: the only other known letter on the subject is one dated 20 December 1957, to Jacques Lederer: “Paris – 20 déc 57 – Stop – livre refusé mais encouragements extrêmement positifs (…)” (Correspondance, p. 61).