Throughout his career, Georges Perec experimented with constraints on composition. Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Aurimages / ZUMA

Even if Georges Perec had not written a novel without the letter “E”—“La disparition,” later rendered into “E”-less English as “A Void”—he would still be one of the most unusual writers of the twentieth century. Among his works are a treatise on the board game Go, a radio play about a machine that analyzes poetry, an autobiography cast in the form of a novel about a city of athletes, an approximately twelve-hundred-word palindrome, a crypto-Marxist anatomy of consumerist Paris, a scrupulously researched history of a wholly fictional painting, a deeply eccentric bucket list (“buy a number of domestic appliances” and “travel by submarine” are among the entries), a memoir composed of four hundred and eighty stand-alone sentences that all begin “I remember,” a novella in which the only vowel used is “E,” a lyric study of Ellis Island, and, from 1976 until his death from cancer, in 1982, a weekly crossword puzzle for the newspaper Le Point. It would be hard to disagree with Italo Calvino that Perec “bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else,” or with Perec himself, who said, in an interview a few years before his death, that he had never written the same thing twice.

Far from a mere collection of nutty pirouettes, Perec’s writing often confronts the most disturbing historical realities. The loss of both his parents at an age when he barely knew them—his father killed by a German bullet, his mother sent off to Auschwitz, both dead before Perec was nine—seems to have become more laceratingly painful the older he got. The missing “E” throughout “La disparition” is phonetically indistinguishable from the pronoun “eux”—“them” (“they” are missing)—and the title is taken from the acte de disparition, the official document that Perec received from the Ministry of War Veterans telling him that his mother was last seen alive in February of 1943. The novel about an island-city of athletes turns out to be a thinly disguised conceit about a concentration camp. The lyric study of Ellis Island is a mournful counterfactual about what might have been had his parents—and many others—made it across the ocean. Perec was heir to the mighty Raymonds—Roussel and Queneau—and, like those grandmasters, he unlocks strange, convulsive worlds made of words, yet his severest formalism is inseparable from an acute sensitivity to human suffering. Still, is it possible to write about unimaginable cruelty with the infantine levity of a jigsaw puzzle?

Perec’s first published novel, “Things: A Story of the Sixties,” from 1965, chronicles the ups and downs (mostly downs) of Jerome and Sylvie, a young professional couple striving to attain status in the “strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture.” The first chapter’s exhaustively itemized description of the chic apartment that they imagine one day acquiring is an early indicator of Perec’s love of taxonomic catalogues and taste for making lists. When Sylvie gets a job teaching in a Tunisian school, the couple sees a chance to escape the rat race of consumerism only to find themselves in a labyrinth of ancient streets, where their own worries over money seem decadent in a place so poor. A few Parisian things—a row of Pléiade editions, a record player and some LPs, an antique nautical map hung on the wall—keep them clinging, with a different kind of desperation, to hopes for a luxurious future. What prevents the novel from being a mere indictment of crass materialism (though it is that) is Perec’s power of noticing thin shades of the quotidian, making it read like a precursor to such hyper-observed novels as Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine.” The book also has a strange, beguiling tone, somewhere between an engagé documentary and an archaeology of taste.

After “Things” won the Prix Renaudot, in 1965, Perec followed it with a bafflingly odd novella, “Which moped with the chrome plated handlebars at the back of the yard?,” which is, among other things, an irreverent repurposing of rhetorical terms picked up from Perec’s desultory attendance in Roland Barthes’s lectures. The book that feels like the real successor to “Things” is “A Man Asleep,” published in 1967. Told in an unwieldy second person, Perec’s “tu” is an impassive cog who plays pinball, goes to movies at random, drinks the same lukewarm Nescafé, orders the same tough steak, oily fries, and cheap red wine at the same bistros, stares at cracks in the ceiling of his flat, plays cards, and has hallucinatory visions in which streaking lights morph into panthers sailing over his head. Some of this is in Beckett territory; at other times, it feels close to the self-tormenting narrator in Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger,” at others, the potent zombie passivity of Melville’s “Bartleby,” a story to which Perec would return.

In 1967, Perec became a member of the Oulipo group of mathematicians and writers, and began experimenting more explicitly with constraints on composition. On its face, the idea of drawing upon arbitrary rules for making art is not remarkable: iambic pentameter, sonata form, the key of B-flat, a piece of stretched canvas, the cropped dimensions of a movie screen, all are different kinds of constraint. Writing a novel without using the letter “E”—Perec’s most conspicuously Oulipian undertaking and one the group placed under the heading lipogram (from lipo, to leave out)—was for Perec less a laboratory experiment or a Houdini-like demonstration than a device designed to spit out ideas. As David Bellos put it, in his excellent biography “Georges Perec: A Life in Words,” Perec began his massive lipogram sensibly enough, by collecting words that didn’t have “E” ’s in them, then “transcribe[d] the day’s catch into files labelled for different narrative situations.” Perec composed the novel during the student revolt of 1968, and its police-state plot, with kids getting harassed, and its challenge to the (alphabetic) status quo seem to reflect what was happening in Paris at the time. It was also through the Oulipo that Perec struck up a lasting friendship with the American writer Harry Mathews, a few of whose novels he translated into French. Mathews in turn said he loved what he called Perec’s deep sense of “rigolade”—fun.

In 1969, Perec told his editor Maurice Nadeau that he was planning an adventure novel which was to appear serially, feuilleton style, as the stories of Jules Verne had. The result was “W, or the Memory of Childhood,” at once a tale of shipwreck, an oblique autobiography, and a peculiar and elaborate fantasy of a city on the island of Tierra del Fuego, organized entirely around sinister sports competitions in which all the athletes wear matching tracksuits emblazoned with the letter “W.” If the premise sounds somewhere between Plato’s Republic and “The Hunger Games,” the narrative moves with the patience of an ethnographic study, as the competitors’ hierarchical reward system—winners are lavishly fêted to the point of being unable to compete the next day, and losers are systematically humiliated and even tortured and killed—comes into focus as an image of a Nazi concentration camp. Again, the most horrific content is made vivid through the most whimsical games: with a few simple graphic permutations, the “W” of the title may yield both a Star of David and a swastika.