2021-05-05 - Amélie Quentel - Les Inrocks
Yves Pagès has gathered all sorts of statistics, jotted down hundreds of percentages in his notebooks, and from this dizzying inventory, produced an odd book, part literary gamemanship in the style of Raymond Queneau and part philosophical musing in the style of Theodor Adorno, reconstituting through these fragments the portrait of a society infested by an accountant’s vision of the world.
This work provides an implicit and caustic analysis of living conditions under the rule of numbers, brightened by a few paradoxical suggestions for slipping through the interstices of the statistical net.
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Yves Pagès is a writer and editor who runs the publishing house Les éditions Verticales with Jeanne Guyon. He has authored over fifteen books, including Petites Natures mortes au travail (Still Lives at Work, Verticales, 2000; Gallimard, « Folio », 2007), Le Théoriste (The Theorist, Verticales, 2001, Wepler Prize), Souviens-moi (Remember Me, L’Olivier, 2014), and Tiens, ils ont repeint ! 50 ans d’aphorismes urbains de 1968 à nos jours (Wow, A New Paint Job! 50 Years of Urban Aphorisms from 1968 to the Present, La Découverte, 2017).