Life: A User's Manual

Life: A User’s Manual, a novel by Georges Perec, was originally published in 1978 under the French title of La Vie mode d’emploi. This remarkable book presents a minutely detailed portrait of a fictional ten-story apartment building in Paris and its scores of inhabitants. A melting pot of classes, nationalities, and occupations, the population of this apartment block yields a bountiful harvest of fascinating narratives, each of which is worthy of a novel of its own. As an intertwined whole, they form a sort of Balzacian tapestry of twentieth century Paris.Perec was one of the founders of the Oulipo movement in literature. To experiment with form and structure, the writers of this French-based literary school applied mathematical and linguistic limitations on their writing. For example, Perec once wrote an entire 300 page novel without using the letter “e” (A Void, published in 1969). Though seemingly a hindrance, such self-imposed restrictions were intended to inspire creativity, much like how some surrealist artists used blindfolded drawings as the basis for their paintings. The mathematical constraints used by Perec in the writing of Life: A User’s Manual are too complicated to explain here (Google it if you want to be confused). The remarkable thing about his writing, however, is that the restrictive rules are unnoticeable in the text, which simply reads like a great work of literature.Rather than a novel, Life: A User’s Manual almost resembles a scenario written for a role-playing game. A map of the imaginary building is provided. When one enters a room, all the various furnishings are described, right down to every last object on the tables, shelves, and walls. Rather than the treasure chests and magical trappings of Dungeons & Dragons, however, the rooms of Perec’s apartment building are furnished with books, postcards, objets d’art, decorative prints, occupational paraphernalia, and miscellaneous ephemera, all intricately described to the last detail. Like Umberto Eco, Perec has a penchant for extensive lists, whether it be the contents of a refrigerator, the items in a shop window, or the artifacts in an archives. Crafted in such exquisite verbal detail, the ten-story apartment building at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier becomes the ultimate life-sized dollhouse.The building’s inhabitants are revealed in a similar level of elaborate detail. The people one meets in this building are defined by their pasts. Though the main narrative of the novel takes place in the present of 1975, all the action occurs in flashbacks, as if the building were now frozen in time. One meets not only the present occupants of the building’s many rooms but also its past denizens as well, as if the story of each room were more important than the lives that took place there. But oh, the lives! Perec comes up with incredibly inventive biographies for the dozens of characters in the book, each more fascinating than the next. The 99 brief and varied chapters amount to a sort of modern Canterbury Tales. The stories are even indexed in the back of the book, with such entries as “The Tale of the Acrobat who did not want to get off his trapeze ever again” or “The Tale of the Neurasthenic Lawyer who settled in Indonesia.”Life: A User’s Manual is the best work of fiction I’ve read in a long time, and I would count it among my ten favorite novels of the second half of the 20th century. Normally I’m not interested in the literary gimmicks and gameplay of modern and postmodern literature, but if this is an indication of the results of the Oulipo group’s experimentation, I look forward to reading more works by Perec and his colleagues.

Brilliant and entertaining. Almost a modern 1001 Nights in that Perec uses the structure of his novel for dozens of short stories about an amazing cast of characters all centered on a single fictional apartment building in Paris at a particular moment in time, just before 8 pm on June 23, 1975.Perec was a member of a group of French writers, the Oulipo group, who wrote imposing arbitrary and sometimes somewhat bizarre constraints on their works. Thus in another of Perec's novels, he did not use the letter 'E'. Here, where Perec has written a chapter for each of the 100 rooms which face the street (10 rooms per floor with 10 floors including the basement and two levels of attics), he includes things like lists of certain numbers of items (often descriptions of the individual room's contents), apparently (I did not work this out for myself) orders the chapters through picturing the building as a 10 X 10 chessboard and moving through the building on a so-called Knight's tour, etc.While knowing of Perec's constraints and plan in the structure of the novel can add considerably to a reader's experience, it is not necessary to even be aware of them to read Life: A User's Manual with enjoyment. The central plot of the book is the tale of Bartlebooth, an extremely wealthy English resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Early in his life Bartlebooth had concluded that there wasn't much point to his life so he creates a plan for how to spend his life and fortune. For 10 years he learned to paint water colors (learning from Valene, an artist who also lives in 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.) Then for 30 years, he traveled the world with his servant Smautf (yet another resident) painting 500 pictures of seaports at a rate of one every couple of weeks on average. The paintings were shipped back to Paris where they were glued to a wood backing and then cut into very difficult jigsaw puzzles by Winkler (another resident) and boxed up. After 30 years, Bartlebooth returns to Paris where one by one he reassembles the puzzles after which each one is treated with a chemical created by Georges Morellet (again a resident) which rebinds the paper. The reconstituted painting is removed from the wooden backing and sent back to where it was painted where (in theory on the exact 20th anniversary of its being painted) a detergent dissolves the picture leaving a blank piece of paper. Thus in the end, (at the focal point in time, Bartlebooth is working on reassembling the 439th puzzle) will leave no mark on the world.The details of this tale are fleshed out during the tour of the apartment building's rooms. In each room, Perec describes the occupants if any and the contents in detail and typically goes on to tell a tale inspired by one of those occupants or contents. Often these tales directly or indirectly related to Bartlebooth's quest but even more often they have nothing to do with the main story line and instead tell of us the stories of other residents or the objects in their rooms, such as that of man who spent his life and fortune in tracking down and killing the woman who as an au pair had caused the death of the man's child which is triggered by the presence in one of the rooms of the au pair's mother.David Beltos' translation reads easily and seems to fit with Perec's original conception. Certainly, Life: A User's Manual will not appeal to everyone. In particular, the inventories of the rooms' contents will irritate some although I found them fascinating. Similarly, the jig-saw puzzle approach to developing the plot will not be to everyone's taste. But for me, I read every page with enjoyment, and would rate this as one of the very best books of the 20th century.

Brilliant book but not for the faint of heart. Stories nested in stories. Lists upon lists. And ultimately what makes a life.

A pretty good work of experimental fiction. The characters are all residents of an apartment building. Each chapter is a story of the characters told through their decor. Some of the stories are wild, and some commonplace. The scheme took me about a 100 pages to get used to. At the center is a character obsessed with tabletop puzzles. This book is also like a puzzle with many pieces.

Nice birthday present for my brother

I am reading this book second time, life is puzzle, sad but lovable. So many characters and flats, within one key to this puzzle resides.Good quality and content

BIEN

to me, it seems so amusing that another reviewer called this 'an exercise in futility, but not for me'. forgive me for being so pedantic...but surely the entire premise of this book is the exercise in futility that we call life. if there is a main character in the building that is the whole universe of this novel, it is bartlebooth, a man so rich that he has devised a plan for his life so deviously futile that despite 50 years, a complete plethora of skills, workmen, travels, paint, glue, jigwaws and postage, he still cant complete, and is left with a jigsaw piece in his hand, that you might think that there is no reason for his life in the first place. but you would be wrong. there is a reason for the lives of every person in this book, in this building, if only to explain the reason for something else. it is a rabbit warren of a read, it is, undoubtedly about the futility of life, but it is brilliantly written, so funny it makes you laugh out loud, and its just life in all its stupidity. it has no narrative, you do not connect with any of the residents, it is a jumble of stories and subterfuges. sometimes you find out why, sometimes you dont..it could be the diary of any building in the world. people come and go, have kids, plans, become rich, lose it all, get murderded, get happy, move away, come back, have another marriage, steal, buy, etc etc. if you are a nosey person and love looking through peoples windows to see what paintings they have on their walls, you will just love this...

I first read this book when I was 17, and have reread it more than once; I loved it the first time, and it gets better each time. Perec can be a bit frustrating, and the book is not necessarily the easiest to get into, but if you give it time, by the end you'll be absolutely hypnotised. What I love especially is his attention to small things, everyday things, insignificant things: these are, after all, what make up life, and by portraying them with such loving care, Perec creates something very beautiful indeed, something like a love-song for ordinary life (though this is not to say there is no drama in the book - there is).If you read Bellos's wonderful biography, a lot of things in the book become clearer, but you don't actually need to follow the various tricks and games (I hadn't a clue when I first read it, but that didn't interfere with my enjoyment). Another reviewer compared Perec to Glenn Gould; it would be equally apt to compare this work, I think, to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (so wonderfully performed by Gould): both take the basic elements and carefully show how they are things of profound beauty.