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I stood near the columbarium at Père Lachaise cemetery I was there to see the locker-like vault containing the ashes of Georges Perec, kept alongside those of his aunt, Esther Bienenfeld To the right of the plaque bearing their names and dates someone had affixed a wildflower to the wall with a Tom and Jerry sticking plaster The columbarium contains thousands of urns stacked in a two-storey grid along one wall of the arcade Its cloister-like arches surround the domed crematorium and its looming chimneys I only recently found Perec’s final resting place, even though I have been reading his work for years – first out of interest, and then as a postgraduate student I knew he had died in 1982, aged just 45, but I hadn’t considered visiting his grave, and didn’t have any idea of its location When you’re trying to research something – certainly when I’m trying to research something – it can be a haphazard, unhappy process, and that was my experience of my PhD years spent attempting to find something original in works already pored over Nevertheless, on occasion something unusual – something that escaped the functional framework I’d been forced to construct for myself – caught my eye, dragged me in, and these are the moments I remember most fondly from my time as a postgraduate student Everything I wrote over those years lies on a shelf somewhere, but everything I need is carried with me: mediated by memory, brought back to me by walking the streets of Paris   It was two years since I had spent a long day in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal – a branch of the French National Library on the right bank of the Seine I was reading through the copious notes that Perec had taken while walking around the French capital as part of his Lieux project, a byzantine autobiographical construction that focused on twelve places in the city known to him; the project was to have taken twelve years to complete, but was never finished The aspect of Perec’s investigations that most intrigued me was his focus on