I've never read anything produced by the OULIPO crew that was so profoundly human--concerned with what it means to be human and the hard work of living that is nevertheless very beautiful. It's interesting to me that a tone that is by and large quite distant--a museum curator's tone, perhaps?--emerges over the course of the novel as affectionate and deeply invested. I'm still trying to unravel for myself the mystery of how Perec gets me to want to read with care so many catalogs of apartment contents and painstaking descriptions of paintings and photographs hanging on walls.

I love the Valéne passages, especially the one in which he imagines a whole subterranean world beneath the building. Maybe that passage provides a kind of clue to my earlier question, for even the dazed Cyclopses toiling among grubs in the deepest depths are protected (their one eye shielded by blue glass), humanized, made lovable in their efforts. I think back to this passage as what softens the pain of seeing a blind Bartlebooth holding that W-shaped puzzle piece over the X-shaped space in the puzzle. Bartlebooth and Valéne are lovable in spite--or because--of their failures to accomplish their grand tasks.