I also saw Perec himself in real life. It was halfway through 1974, the year he published Species of Spaces. I'd seen lots of photographs of him, but that day, in the bookshop on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I saw him arrive for the launch of a book by Phillippe Sollers and do very strange things I won't go into now. What is certain is that for quite a while, so impressed to be seeing him in real life, I watched him intently, so intently that, at one moment, his face was a hair's breadth from mine. Perec noticed this anomaly - a stranger was a whisker away from his goatee - and reacted by commenting out loud, as if trying to let me know I should take my face elsewhere: "The world's a big place, young man."
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