53 jours

Georges Perec mapped out a detective novel in 28 chapters but died before finishing it. Friends later assembled the usable parts of the unfinished work from his notebooks.

The story follows a narrator who is posted to the French colonies as a mathematics teacher. Alongside his classroom duties, he is also charged with tracking down an arms dealer.

Perec was a member of the Oulipo, a group of French writers who built their work around self-imposed formal rules. This posthumous novel shows the crime plot he left behind.