The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, by Georges Perec – review | Books | The Guardian

…the whole resembles a lightly frothed kafka tale digitised as a text-adventure game thus anticipating later experiments in “interactive fiction” while also functioning as a satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life which was always after all the genius of perec to marry a deeply humane melancholy with dazzling formal experiments of which this one is also a deftly recursive simulation of the choices facing the writer of fiction as the text circles back on itself with varied refrains such as one on the need to keep things simple which of course they never are or an insistence on the logical law of the excluded middle ie “it’s one or t’other” seeing which peculiar choice of phrase on nearly every page you will either become terribly annoyed or you won’t let’s assume to keep things plausible that you do in which case you might want to check the french original so…

The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, by Georges Perec – review | Books | The Guardian.