[2] Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s.

Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from untreated gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and his mother was killed in the Holocaust, probably in Auschwitz sometime after 1943.

In 1958/59 Perec served in the French army as a paratrooper (XVIIIe Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes); he married Paulette Petras after being discharged.

In any case, Perec's work on the reassessment of the academic journals under subscription was influenced by a talk about the handling of scientific information given by Eugene Garfield in Paris, and he was introduced to Marshall McLuhan by Jean Duvignaud.

Perec began working on a series of radio plays with his translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz [de] in the late 60s; less than a decade later, he was making films.

His first cinematic work, based on his novel Un Homme qui dort, was co-directed by Bernard Queysanne [fr], and won the feature-film Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) brought Perec some financial and critical success—it won the Prix Médicis—and allowed him to turn to writing full-time.

La Vie mode d'emploi is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block.

Two alternating narratives make up the volume: The first is a fictional outline of a remote island country called "W", which at first appears to be a utopian society modelled on the Olympic ideal but is gradually exposed as a horrifying, totalitarian prison much like a concentration camp.

The novel was reworked several times and retitled Le Condottière[7] and published in 2012; its English translation by Bellos followed in 2014 as Portrait of a Man after the 1475 painting of that name by Antonello da Messina.

[8] The initial title borrows the name Gaspard from the Paul Verlaine poem "Gaspar Hauser Chante"[2] (inspired by Kaspar Hauser, from the 1881 collection Sagesse) and characters named "Gaspard" appear in both W, or the Memory of Childhood and Life: A User's Manual, while in MICRO-TRADUCTIONS, 15 variations discrètes sur un poème connu he creatively re-writes the Verlaine poem fifteen times.