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Life: A User's Manual

Georges Perec,

David Bellos (Translator)

4.21 · Rating details · 7,383 ratings · 688 reviews

Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, ...more

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Paperback, 581 pages

Published October 1988 by David R. Godine, Publisher (first published May 15th 1978)

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Dec 22, 2016 Steven Godin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: france, favourites, postmodern-fiction, paris

The first time I laid eyes on Georges Perec (not too dissimilar from his profile photo) many wild thoughts went through my head, a former child genius maybe, who had a nervous breakdown, ran away from home and was taken in by a religious cult that wore white robes and worshipped the moons of Jupiter, or a crazy scientist who spent far too much time in a dingy basement playing around with bunsen-burners and messing with chemical formulas, or how about a quite brilliant eccentric piano player who
The first time I laid eyes on Georges Perec (not too dissimilar from his profile photo) many wild thoughts went through my head, a former child genius maybe, who had a nervous breakdown, ran away from home and was taken in by a religious cult that wore white robes and worshipped the moons of Jupiter, or a crazy scientist who spent far too much time in a dingy basement playing around with bunsen-burners and messing with chemical formulas, or how about a quite brilliant eccentric piano player who was kidnapped by a Colombian drug cartel and forced to play a birthday concert for the wife of a cartel boss in a hidden mansion, only to develop a seriously bad coke habit before being released.

Sometimes our minds wonder here, there and everywhere!, in the case of Perec, he takes the concept of an imaginative mindset but rises to a whole other level. Paul Auster who was a big fan is quoted as saying 'a dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination', well, it's every bit dazzling, monumental in size, and as for imagination it's simply like nothing else I have ever come across. From the opening few chapters, right through to it's end, Perec's ingenious novel is complex, puzzling, serious, side-splitting funny and wholly original.

So, ever looked up at an apartment building and wondered what goes on in there? Ever looked at a lit window across the street and wanted to know what the person inside was getting up to? Ever seen an old lady, dressed in expensive clothes, walking her dog up the front steps of a grand town house and thought, just what her life has been like? All the things she has seen and done, her lost loves, the family that are no longer alive, where did she holiday?, does she have children? her whole existence echoing down the years?. Well Perec obviously did. Chapter by Chapter we are taken over by the many different lives that have inhabited a Parisian apartment block spanning sixty years. As Serge Valene (who is at the center of the novel) contemplates the lives of people he has seen come and go over the years, revealing the most diverse, marvelous, outrageous and strangest bunch of characters I can think of. The sheer quantity of them is nothing short of phenomenal! sometimes we are taken not just through the lives of residents, but also the history of their families as well, each and every tale within are, shall we say, never conventional and most border on damn right lunacy!, as for any plot, forget it.

Travelling around rooms, floor by floor, entering through each door, we get a low down of the furniture, what type?, what colour?, is it old?, is it new? What's hung on walls?, what's the carpet like?, how's the bed?, what personal items are lying around?, what food is in the kitchen?, is there pets?, is the place tidy, messy, smelly?. And this only touches the surface!, as the attention to detail walking around these apartment rooms is so thorough, it feels as if you are trapped inside one gigantic department store showroom!, so the building itself becomes a living, breathing part of the jigsaw, just as much as the actual residents. We don't just get the occupants of each room, but previous occupants as well, and their life experiences, ups and downs, tears and laughter.

There is a voyeuristic thrill the further we journey around the building, it grows on us, it becomes our home as much as theirs. And as various events overlap and interact with others, making Life feel more of a montage than a formal portrait, and geographically as well as historically leaves the reader completely bedazzled, but of course I have been so overly enthusiastic in my positives here, there must be negatives right? yes, there is.

For a start navigating around over 100 rooms was always going to reach a point where possible boredom sets in, as the excess of descriptive narration throughout the whole book is er...excessive.
Also with whole pages within chapters that contain various different lists, BIG ones!, it's quite easy to just skip through 2-3 pages and not really miss a thing. In fact I could see many people just skip whole chapters. Don't get me wrong , these lists are interesting, but do become tedious and reveal very little regarding the actual occupant of that particular room. However there is the bonus of drawings and extra textual material, some of which is genuinely useful for the overall reading process. Perec is also a bit of a showoff regarding his vast knowledge of the possibilities of consumerism in 70's Paris. But I guess in a way he has every right to feel overly confident.

Just so much I loved about it. It's between this and Céline's Journey to the End of the Night as my fave French novel. ...more

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Feb 03, 2012 Megha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: kickass, reviews

Last night after I had finished reading this book, there still lingered a smile on my face. I had read last 100-ish pages in a rush. It was only after I finished reading and put the book down that I realized that I was going to miss this charming book.

After hearing out little anecdotes and life stories of a multitude of characters, after reliving moments of their lives through their stories, it is now time to say our goodbyes. I stand at the doorstep waving my hand and watching those figures shr ...more

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Feb 21, 2010 Geoff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: infinite-books

Another example of one of those rare works that seemingly contain Everything, Life does not lend itself to brief summation. Like one of those tiny foam dinosaurs that grow to a humongous size when soaked in water (is that really the best simile I can come up with? jesus...), after closing the last of its 600 pages I still feel it expanding. Just look at the appendices. Hundreds of characters, over hundreds of years, hundreds of stories, hundreds of interconnections, all planned down to the centi Another example of one of those rare works that seemingly contain Everything, Life does not lend itself to brief summation. Like one of those tiny foam dinosaurs that grow to a humongous size when soaked in water (is that really the best simile I can come up with? jesus...), after closing the last of its 600 pages I still feel it expanding. Just look at the appendices. Hundreds of characters, over hundreds of years, hundreds of stories, hundreds of interconnections, all planned down to the centimeter using these constraints. If Perec wrote no other book than this he would deservedly be considered a genius. The best novel of the 1970’s? Last half of the 20th century? I don’t know, but I’d put it in the running. Let’s argue about this heatedly in a 5 page comment thread. Or not. But there is an entire world come to life in these 600 pages, heavily populated, intricate, seething, over-full, all generated from the minute exploration of the individual living quarters in an apartment building on a fictional street in Paris. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, imaginary Paris, arrondissment Georges Perec.

One of my absolute favorite films is Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The main cinematic technique that lends the film its particular rhythm is the “slow zoom out”. A scene begins with the camera focused very closely on one or two subjects or objects, and then is slowly pulled back, maintaining a deep-field focus, deliberately and quietly minimizing the subjects within the frame of the screen, showing the size and composition of the world in which they are contained. There is a similar literary strategy at play in Life. Chapters usually begin with a few paragraphs describing in great detail objects in a particular room- paintings, furniture, appliances, clothing, knick-knacks, etc.- and then those objects are slowly “zoomed” away from, and the story is told of the inhabitants of those rooms, or of someone associated with those objects or the place in which those objects rest. The feeling evoked is similar in Barry Lyndon and Life, the tight focus on minutiae and then the slow revealing of its place in an immense story. Though there is a crucial difference. Kubrick’s technique was employed to show a thing’s limitations within a space; Perec’s technique is employed to show their resonance; how these small, almost indifferent things are the clues left behind that, when worked through, piece together immense worlds.

So much of this book is lists of objects, beautifully described. Objects, which so readily accumulate the patina of time, which often outlive us, which stay where we leave them, signifiers of who we are, were, wanted to be- those versions of ourselves we discarded out of need or necessity or on a whim, what we sloughed off but couldn’t bring ourselves to throw away. Keepsakes of our affinities. Objects, whose arrangement in our lives is like the finger trace left in a film of dust on an old desk, the proof we came this way, did this or that. These can be things as simple as our socks and old photographs, souvenirs of voyages, or as complex as novels we write, the family trees we form a branch of. The way we arrange objects, and the objects we choose to keep around us, speak volumes of our interior lives. These lists of objects that make up so much of Life are the great part the characterizations of the people who make up this book. But lists of objects work in another way, too. Lists draw attention only to themselves. They leave the signifier untouched by a narrative purpose. Purposeless, they speak to the meaning of the word as it is written, and give only that meaning. By serving no purpose in a narrative, an object of pure description survives the various ways a story can be dragged into oblivion by the words employed in its telling. It is the thing itself. A book made up of lists is therefore an undying book, giving meaning only in and of itself and the objects it names. However, the objects in Life don’t sit there unattached to narrative, they initiate the endless narratives. Apart and interwoven, Perec has reconciled the solitary object with the relic of time (its “story”), by leaving the things accumulated as starting points of their own histories. So Life is both Flaubert’s ideal “book about nothing”, while simultaneously satisfying Queneau’s idea that all novels reflect either the Iliad or the Odyssey. A book of nothings and everythings; of things immobile as well as lives unfurling.

Life is such a generous book, it gives so much, its complexities always yielding to some basic joy, its ironies giving insights, its tragedies so beautiful, its mysteries so delightful, its intelligence steeped in playfulness, its erudition serving such human ends. 1,001 Parisian Nights. Another infinite novel.

“Sometimes Valène had the feeling that time had been stopped, suspended, frozen around he didn’t know what expectation. The very idea of the picture he planned to do and whose laid-out, broken-up images had begun to haunt every second of his life, furnishing his dreams, squeezing his memories, the very idea of this shattered building laying bare the cracks of its past, the crumbling of the present, this unordered amassing of stories grandiose and trivial, frivolous and pathetic, gave him the impression of a grotesque mausoleum raised in the memory of companions petrified in terminal postures as insignificant in their solemnity as they were in their ordinariness, as if he had wanted both to warn of and to delay these slow or quick deaths which seemed to be engulfing the entire building storey by storey. Monsieur Marcia, Madame Moreau, Madame de Beaumont, Bartlebooth, Rorschach, Mademoiselle Crespi, Madame Albin, Smautf. And himself, of course, Valène himself, the longest inhabitant of the house.”
...more

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Apr 22, 2014 Paul rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Let’s be clear from the outset, ‘Life a User’s Manual’ is my favourite book of all time. It's everything a novel should or ever could be. Big characters, ripping yarns, wonderful descriptions, word play, structural experimentation and a sad truth at its heart...

It’s an existentialist work, in essence, tempered by its humanitarian outlook, but a book nonetheless about the pointlessness of human endeavour. The labours of the many characters contained here generally come to naught.

And it’s a book ...more

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Dec 23, 2007 Stacy rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: anyone with a pulse and a smidgen of curiosity and intelligence about the world.

Recommended to Stacy by: ryan platt

i may have mentioned this before, but i had an ephiphanal reader experience last fall. last fall i was lucky enough to score a ticket to hear salman rushdie read at cornell. the experience left me not only with a hankering to read sir rushdie, but also to make a solemn promise to myself to read "less crap." a disclaimer: i don't think that any of what i read is actually "crap" but that my promise to myself was invoking rather a desire to put myself forward at least a fraction of the distance tha i may have mentioned this before, but i had an ephiphanal reader experience last fall. last fall i was lucky enough to score a ticket to hear salman rushdie read at cornell. the experience left me not only with a hankering to read sir rushdie, but also to make a solemn promise to myself to read "less crap." a disclaimer: i don't think that any of what i read is actually "crap" but that my promise to myself was invoking rather a desire to put myself forward at least a fraction of the distance that a truly gifted writer extends themselves when creating a masterful piece of literature.

listening to rushdie, i realized i'd been having flings with lots of small novellas that required really nothing of me as a reader. they were passably enjoyable, in many cases i had become familiar with the writer's style and their cadence and this familiarity is pleasing to a reader, but i really hadn't sunk my teeth into anything that required of me any more than an ability to read. not that i needed to tackle the canon, whatever that was, but that life is short, man, and there are some amazing, nuanced, change-your-life tomes out there and i'd been avoiding them.

so that in mind, i tore through rushdie's midnight's children (which entirely delivered on that front), and then cast about looking for the "what next."

having a partner that majored in french literature is always handy in such situations. he recommended this novel. i let it fester on my bookshelf for a while (if 600 pages isn't intimidating, i don't know what is), and then finally put it in my suitcase to take back with me to berlin (where i am living/working remotely for a stretch).

the novel is honestly, one of the most amazing things i have ever read. you are given many stories within the bindings, and many lifetimes. the novel takes you through the lives of all the inhabitants in an 1960's walk-up flat in paris, but with a difference. the rooms, the ephemera and the stories of each of these people carry equal importance throughout the novel, and while epic, it is not the traditional epic narrative of one or two family's lives. in the back of the book, preceding a rather fantastic index, is an architectural floorplan of the building, to which i found myself referring to in every story. each block stands for one person's abode, and often in italics above the current resident is the name of the previous long-term tenant. the stories of the lives of those in the building will leave you slack-jawed. you will wonder about the lives of those you know passingly or not at all, those that you encounter closely or obliquely in your everyday life. there are no morals or moralizing in this tome, and you will find yourself often on the heels of yet another impossibly captivating read about the details of one of the tenant's lives, and then immediately be cast into three pages discussing three paintings hanging on a wall in another apartment.

this last artifact is something that exasperated my boyfriend, r., who has read it twice in the original french. perec once worked as an archivist at a neurophysiological research laboratory, which may account for his vast interest in the kinds of minutae described in the book (minutae which, in the original french, accounts for some pretty wacky and often anachronistic language that isn't always found in french-english dictionaries). you will find yourself encountering lists upon lists, and wondering what it all means, or worse, tempted to skim ahead to the next great story. DON'T. skim the lists, that is. as you read on, you will come to understand that the intention of the author both towards the novel and towards you, the reader, is to understand that the ephemera, the lists, the lives of things are every bit as important as the impossibly fantastic stories told side-by-side about the characters inhabiting the building. that while experiences gives these characters meaning in our eyes, these people's possessions, ephemera and clutter give meaning to theirs. you will find that they are given equal consideration and measure. you may further find yourself being surprised to agree with perec on his choosing and understanding of this matter.

there is a kind of loose narrative thread in the novel, a few characters you are made to care about more than others. i don't want to give it away, but suffice it to say that each night that i sat down to read another 10, 20, or 100 pages of this novel, ryan was enjoying reliving his reading through my retelling of some little gem that i had just gotten to, or expanded my understanding of something that had occurred 200 pages earlier, or what-have-you. another note about reading it: it's not the kind of novel that you necessarily feel compelled to read straight through in a compressed amount of time. at least i didn't. i took a few months with this novel, and the pacing and manner of storytelling in it is such that it can be picked up and left off reasonably at most places in the book.

when you finally finish it, i don't doubt that you will be left with the feeling that you have just had a once-in-a-lifetime reading experience, and that you are a better person for it. ...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Lee Klein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

By about page 200, this was firmly in my top 10 fave books. By the end, it seemed to me like a clear-cut canonical biggie (eg, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, 2666, Ulysses), but better natured than these -- also, it didn't seem like much of a chip was trying to be knocked off the authorial shoulder. Joyce took on Shakespeare, DFW tried to depose the postmodernist phallocracy, but Perec seems more at peace. It's like Beckett's sucking stones section in Molloy: elaborate, infinitely detailed processes ...more

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Jan 29, 2010 MJ Nicholls rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: oulipians, pernod-and-gauloises, voluminous, novels

List of items in my bathroom: abacus, bouzouki once strummed by Warren Ellis, cauliflowers in brocade, Dungeons & Dragoons strategy wargame for Windows ’95, elf ears, Farsi medical dictionary, gorgonzola, Hunter S. Thompson commemorative pineapple, inkwell, Jenga set, knitting needle made from yarn, Lemsip in cherry and chocolate flavours, mangle, nachos, octopus-patterned duvet cover, Peter Andre poster circa Mysterious Girl, quicksand, rum, salsa shoes, Total Recall 4-DVD set, Ulysses in Every ...more

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Aug 19, 2013 Mala rated it it was amazing

Shelves: post-modern-fiction, all-time-favourites, brain-pain-group-read

Recommended for: Readers looking for something 'DIFFERENT'.

Georges Perce brought his multifaceted* talent to this amazing book Life A User’s Manual . Nine years in the making, it won him the Prix Médicis & a solid international credential.
An offbeat, quirky tale, its cumulative effect is staggering! Approach its playful inventiveness appreciatively & it'll prove to be a rewarding read. Feel bogged down by its endless lists of objects & paraphernalia, and you won't make much headway.

An Oulipian ...more

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Nov 03, 2007 Paul Bryant added it

Shelves: novels, abandoned

A pre-review

This big novel has been on my (physical) shelf for years, it feels almost indecent to pick it up and actually begin it. Especially when I don't think I'll like it. Which is a shame, because I like the idea of Georges Perec, and I like the photo of him in the front here. I like the cut of his jib. He has a cat on his shoulder. So, I'll give it 100 pages. Then I expect I'll say something like: Georges Perec is the larval stage of the French whimsy which became the butterfly of Jean-Pie ...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Nick Craske rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: rightly-revered-ritings

George Perec’s novel was published in French in 1978 and first published in English in 1987. This could not have been an easy assignment for the translator.

The opening quotation, 'Look with all your eyes, look.’ —quoting Jules Verne— is both an allusion to the wonder of both deciphering how we see the world and how we remember what we have seen. Or think we have seen...

This glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Perec’s canvas an George Perec’s novel was published in French in 1978 and first published in English in 1987. This could not have been an easy assignment for the translator.

The opening quotation, 'Look with all your eyes, look.’ —quoting Jules Verne— is both an allusion to the wonder of both deciphering how we see the world and how we remember what we have seen. Or think we have seen...

This glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Perec’s canvas and construct is a single Parisian apartment building and across 99 episodic chapters he describes in meticulous and often intricate detail each and every room. And we the viewer are transplanted from apartment-to-apartment (if one were to view the building front on like a Chess board) via a single knight's move.

A knight moves two squares parallel to one side of the board and one square parallel to the other side. Any such move always takes the knight to a square of the opposite colour. In 99 moves the knight can move across every square on the board...

Ostensibly, as we traverse the building and the matrix of descriptive details within, we are watching the creation of a painting by Serge Valene, an old artist who has lived in the building for 55 years.

A novel of such intense descriptive writing, you might think, would collapse in on itself under relentless documenting of detail. The opposite is true, for Perec also expresses the humanity in the heartfelt life stories —through the ages— of every inhabitant of the building. This array of ornate detail serves to amplify each person's story. The macro details lead us down into the elliptical narratives of each inhabitant in sweeping cinematic style: through elaborate vintage keyholes, ascending up into antique chandeliers to look down upon classical sheet music atop a rare Steinway piano to traverse the musical staves and begin learning of the history of each note’s inscription and the hand that wrote them; and the train they were on; and the train passenger’s neighbour’s hat… and the story behind the hat maker… and on, and up and diagonally across… through time and memory... from apartment-to-apartment... piece-by-piece… the jigsaw... the picture...

Life: A User's Manual can be read as a parable about the efforts of the human mind to impose an arbitrary order on the world. Or a meditation on memory... even the act of writing itself. This is a glorious book in both its inventive structure and its rich visual descriptions.

...more

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Feb 10, 2017 Chris_P rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-and-modern-classics, 5-star-diamonds

Life: A User's Manual

I seek the eternal and the ephemeral

Having just closed the book, I feel a bunch of things. Perec captures a certain moment in time in the lives of the residents of a certain building and gives us the most detailed description of this snapshot. Lists upon lists and descriptions upon descriptions of apartments, rooms, people, paintings and objects that compose this moment which, as is the case with all moments, doesn't consist only of present elements, but also ones that belon ...more

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Nov 07, 2015 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Life: A User's Manual is the absolute and fundamental treatise on the theme of jigsaw puzzles where every chapter is a piece in a puzzle – a fragment of a house, a tessera of the cosmic mosaic.
“The room’s walls are painted in white gloss. Several framed posters are hanging on them. One of them depicts four greedy-looking monks sitting at table around a Camembert cheese on the label of which four greedy-looking monks – the very same – are again at table around, etc. The scene is repeated distinct ...more

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Aug 28, 2013 knig rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, whatthe-hell, abandoned

I used to be able to file a book without a rating: what happened? I don't want to give this book one or any stars: its not that its a bad book, its just not for me. I never liked Gabriel Garcia's 100 years nor Robert Altman's Short Cuts: the formula just doesn't do it for me: I can't take multiple narrative threads, hundreds of characters, all running around hither and thither like headless chickens till it does my head in and I don't know whats what, objects and stories and protags multiplying ...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Joshua rated it it was amazing

Sometimes you read a book at the perfect time. This is simultaneously the perfect book for winter binge reading and also the perfect book for fifteen minutes bus rides at the beginning and end of the day.

One could argue that there is some overarching/subterranean narrative tying this whole behemoth of a novel together - people grab onto the Bartlebooth saga with the jigsaw puzzles and the landscape water colors - but in truth this book is a compendium of wide-ranging stories all containing some Sometimes you read a book at the perfect time. This is simultaneously the perfect book for winter binge reading and also the perfect book for fifteen minutes bus rides at the beginning and end of the day.

One could argue that there is some overarching/subterranean narrative tying this whole behemoth of a novel together - people grab onto the Bartlebooth saga with the jigsaw puzzles and the landscape water colors - but in truth this book is a compendium of wide-ranging stories all containing some varying kernel of truth concerning the collective human experience. There's an index in the back of my volume of this book of just some of the innumerable stories contained therein. Upon perusing the index it's hard for me to imagine anyone coming away with a clear sense of exactly what this book is about (The Tale of the acrobat who did not want to get off his trapeze ever again, the Tale of the Designer who had to dismantle the kitchen he was so proud of, the Tale of the Hampster deprived of his favourite game, the Tale of the Lord who hid his secret passions beneath sham crazes, the Man who bought the Vase of the Passion, the Thrice-Murdered Jeweller....)

You'd think this all would be too much but, despite the scattered variety - a veritable freakshow - the novel feels whole and every character and every story seems to have found its place. This is not entirely due to the elaborate apartment block schema which so many other reviewers have shed immensely useful light on. It also has to do with the consistency of Perec's voice, filled with compassion for the vagaries of human life and a curiosity about all of the things of the world.

Throw on top of all of this the innumerable references to Perec's literary favorites littered through the book, we have something that is hard to put down. Apparently, every chapter has both a direct and veiled reference to or quotation of one of approximately twenty authors, including crowd favorites such as Joyce, Borges, Proust, and Kafka. (For a useful user's manual to Life a User's Manual visit: http://escarbille.free.fr/vme/?lmn=3)

I thought it would be fascinating to map out all of the hidden references in the novel - sort of like assembling a bunch of completely white jigsaw puzzles for the thrill of it. I gave it a shot figuring that I would have the best chance of picking up on either the Kafka or the Nabokov allusions. I quickly became exhausted though I did have a little success.

For example, from the above site I learned that Chapter 69 contained some form of hidden Nabokov reference, so I took up the very Nabokovian task of discerning that hidden reference with my bare hands and a large stack of Nabokov sitting nearby.

This first one was pretty easy, I opened to Chapter 69 and (bam!) right in the middle of the page is a diagram of a chess problem. In my mind that alone would have sufficed as evidence of a hidden Nabokov reference - but I kept digging anyway for the fun of it. A couple paragraphs in Perec describes in detail three pictures hanging on a wall (not the first or last time this happens). The second is by the American artist Organ Trapp - hmm Trapp, I've seen that name before, doesn't Humbert Humbert have some distant relative named Trapp who looks strikingly like Quilty? Humbert remembers this relative one day when he notices a man in his rear-view mirror following in a car behind him as he and Lolita make their escape across the country. The picture described by Perec depicts a gas station in Wyoming so we're definitely narrowing in on the road-trip chapters of Lolita where Nabokov really drums up his best roadside Americana. Perec lists the details of the gas station: "a green garbage can, very black, very whitewalled tyres for sale, bright cans of motor oil, a red icebox with assorted drinks." That rainbow of assorted junk has to be Nabokov. I got lucky on this one and knew roughly where to turn in Lolita and found the exact phrase about two pages into the 16th chapter of Part Two. My luck sort of ended there and I resorted to just googling particularly colorful passages in the other chapters I knew were supposed to contain Nabokov references.

I scoured through chapter 28 for a while since that is the first of the Nabokov chapters. A little snippet caught my eye, set off in italics at the bottom of a page - bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows. I threw this into my search bar and, lo and behold, a hit, but not what I am looking for. Turns out this little ditty comes from Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." Poe isn't even on the cheat sheet chart! This is just a bonus Perec threw in for lonely little enchanted reference hunters like myself.

It's easy for me to get carried away with this sort of thing. I'd like to think that the social power of goodreads could somehow manage to unearth all of these little hidden gems and collect them all in one space because that would be awesome. If you have stumbled across any of the other hidden literary allusions let me know!

Anyway, this is a great book and it is amazing how Perec managed to pack in so much stuff (the references, the Knight's tour schema, etc) and still somehow manage to create and tie together so many far-flung and interesting stories about people who all lived in the same apartment block in Paris during one moment in time. ...more

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Oct 21, 2013 Marc rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french-literature, paris

Life, a never ending puzzle
A manual of a machine usually begins with the description of the parts and then shows how the machine works. The French writer Georges Perec (1936-1982) does more or less the same in this voluminous book. In each chapter he describes a room in a big house in Paris, starting with a detailed account of the objects in the room and then zooming in on the resident(s); often their story is more explicitly told.

In his foreword Perec offers a key to read this book: to look at Life, a never ending puzzle
A manual of a machine usually begins with the description of the parts and then shows how the machine works. The French writer Georges Perec (1936-1982) does more or less the same in this voluminous book. In each chapter he describes a room in a big house in Paris, starting with a detailed account of the objects in the room and then zooming in on the resident(s); often their story is more explicitly told.

In his foreword Perec offers a key to read this book: to look at it as a puzzle, beforehand constructed by someone, and to reconstruct it with the use of some techniques. This is in line with Perec's literary experiments and the Oulipo-group he was part of. It also suggests this book is no more than a kind of game, with no existential message.

I have some problem with this: implicitly in all the stories and lists there is a message. I read this as follows: men isn't capable to get a global look on the puzzle of life and detect a meaning, but nevertheless he strives (some more passionately than others) to fill out his life, to give it meaning; this results in a network of traces and objects (I refer to the lists of content of the rooms), and very often (almost always) in a sense of dissapointment and frustration.

Perec has created a tremendous work of art, very ingenious and intelligent, and also very erudite and encyclopedic. Furthermore some of his little stories are really beautiful; they tend to give this book the character of a new "1001-nights". But nevertheless, it doesn't convince me all the way: the endless lists, though they illustrate the richness and labyrinthic character of human life, are very dispiriting (I confess I read them rather diagonal in the second half of the book); above all I was very disappointed Perec always looks at the outside of objects and people, never disclosing the inside (which of course is much more difficult), and this explains why he misses the essence of life; his puzzle always remains but a puzzle, never more. ...more

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Jun 27, 2010 Jonfaith rated it it was amazing

Simultaneously so massive and yet so minute, allow a quick consulting of your Anti-Oedipus and then bring this to resolution. This novel brought considerable warmth and a curious attention to matters. Much like black bean hummus. Don't eat this book. Such requires a chuckle as I type. ...more

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Apr 15, 2018 Alex rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was a very original book. 99 chapters, each containing something else. You can practically read this book starting with what chapter you want and then go in a random fashion and it won't be a problem.
The descriptions of Perec are almost photographic, they really challenge your power of imagination. He starts at the door and then goes deep and describes something written in a book which is shown in a photograph held by a guy who is in a painting. Something like that.
The characters of Perec ...more

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Aug 24, 2007 Brian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: anyone who exists

Shelves: genetic-imperative

Many people misinterpret nihilism as only a negative or cynical approach to life and to the cosmos. But with "Life: A User's Manual" (LAUM) I sense that Georges Perec is approaching nihilism as a very positive, creative force of being. LAUM accepts our essential nothingness, but revels in the process that takes place between the birth nothing and the death nothing. We are able to exercise an exuberant free will, bouncing around within the framework of those two framing events of birth and death ...more

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Oct 23, 2017 Jean-Marc Bonet rated it it was amazing

I will never think of an apartment building the same way again. Or Perec for that matter, who I have given up on before, not this time.

An astonishing, inventive masterpiece. Will live long in the memory.

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Dec 28, 2014 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: unexpectedly-terrific

You have to make it through the first 50 pages, which are heavy sledding. But then, somehow, it took off (for me, at least).

Which surprised the hell out of me, to be honest. Because normally I just can't abide descriptions of furniture, and rooms and stuff -- I tend to skim right over it. Perec spends an inordinate amount of space in describing the furnishings, when he's not making up amusingly wacky lists, or telling another shaggy dog story about some guy getting fleeced or murdered or jilted ...more

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Oct 21, 2015 Paul Dembina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Enjoyed this much more 2nd time around having no expectations.
Recommended

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May 24, 2012 Adam Floridia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: discovered-thanks-to-goodreads, 5-star-books, being-a-human

What is this book? It’s a picture. A picture cut into pieces—like a jigsaw puzzle—for the reader to reassemble. They say “a picture is worth 1,000 words”? Well, Perec’s picture is worth approximately 238,560 words (I counted the words on one page and multiplied by the number of pages, hence the “approximately). So what is this massive picture? Well, it’s
(view spoiler) ...more

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Dec 03, 2007 Christina rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: not everyone!

Shelves: 1001-books-2008-edition, library, fiction, favourites, 1001-books-2010-edition, 2007, 1001-books-2006-edition, 1001-books-combined-edition

Now, I loved this book so why don't I recommend it to everyone? Let me try to tell you - this is a book about the people who live (or have lived) in an appartment building in Paris in the 20th century. Their lives and stories twist and tangle and intertwine and breaks up again. Every part of the book is valued equal - that means, that a chaper can be a list of objects found on the staircase and another - just as important! - chapter can be the story of how the daughter of one of the residents go ...more

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Oct 20, 2010 Kathleen rated it did not like it

Abandoning novels feels sort of cruel, like letting a whole bunch of people just fade out of your life without trying hard enough to get to know them, so generally speaking if I get past the first chapter I won't give up on a novel. It does happen though: Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way come to mind, so at least my abandoned novels are fairly diverse. With regret, 200 pages in, I’m adding George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual to the melancholy little li Abandoning novels feels sort of cruel, like letting a whole bunch of people just fade out of your life without trying hard enough to get to know them, so generally speaking if I get past the first chapter I won't give up on a novel. It does happen though: Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way come to mind, so at least my abandoned novels are fairly diverse. With regret, 200 pages in, I’m adding George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual to the melancholy little list.

Life is an account of a single day in a Parisian apartment block. The chapters move through the buildings from room to room in the way a chess-piece knight moves across a board. Fragments of information about the occupants’ stories appear alongside descriptions of objects filling the rooms. Stories spill out: an account of a painting can explain the story depicted, the life of the artist or a historical event tenuously connected to the picture.

In reading I was torn between frustration at meeting yet another description of a table or empty room and intrigue at how all these stories might fit together. Perec treats the building like a mystery plot with a single figure at the heart of it, the artist Bartlebooth. Ultimately, the descriptions became too much. May the gods of reading forgive me, but I looked up the plot on Wikepedia to decide whether or not to keep going. The plot is this: Bartlebooth spent 20 years travelling and painting ports, then got these pictures turned into jigsaws. He spent the rest of his life putting the jigsaws back together. Once the image is assembled he destroys it, so nothing remains of his art. But tragically for Bartlebooth, he runs out of time and a few paintings are left behind when he dies.

This is just too contrived to bear. I guess Perec wishes to make a point about life, how we fill it up with things, things remain and we don’t. Alongside the persistence of things, presumably there is the meaningless interconnectedness of life, like Derridean philosophy: every thing is known only by its relations to all the things it is not, identity being nothing more than a network of absence or non-being. Yes, I’m hoping that misunderstanding Derrida absolves me for abandoning this novel.

Years ago I read Perec’s A Void, a novel written entirely without using the letter e. Writing under such a constraint is some feat in French, a language heavy in e’s, and the translator did a superb job replicating the game in English. But Perec is so absorbed in tricks, life finds no way into the novels. Lots of blurbs on Life: A User’s Manual compare it to Ulysses, but the comparison makes no sense to me. Every word of Joyce’s thrums with vitality, but Perec’s novel felt stifled by its rules and, finally, stifling. ...more

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Sep 27, 2019 Curtainthief rated it it was amazing

Shelves: top-shelf, 2019-sublime

Have you chosen your purpose or fallen into it, unaware? Have you seen it through, abandoned it, or failed? Has your purpose changed? Do you have a purpose, or is it just the story of your life, cobbled together into a haphazard narrative? Do your possessions reveal something about your psychology? Your experiences? Or are your accumulated trinkets, your environment, your home, a disorganized and ill-considered catalog? Didn't you receive a Manual when you started this whole thing? ...more

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Apr 21, 2010 Emily added it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010, favorites

The painter and collage-ist Robert Rauschenberg came of age during the heyday of abstract expressionism in the New York scene; and while his own work involves a similar level of abstraction (as, for example, 1954's Charlene, pictured above), he often found himself at odds with the dominant rhetoric of the "tortured artist." "There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism," he says, "that personally always put me off."

There was a whole language tha

...more

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Jan 27, 2008 Conor rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-fiction

Well, hi there Goodreads! How have you been? It’s been about five months since I’ve reviewed a book. Hopefully that’ll be understandable after the following review.

First off, I’ve been writing an essay. Writing slows down my reading. That’ll be important below.

I’m going to use one of those little spoiler cut lines here. This is my idea of irony, because there’s no plot to spoil, since there's no plot at all. Oh, there's characters, and places, but if forty pages were missing from your copy, you Well, hi there Goodreads! How have you been? It’s been about five months since I’ve reviewed a book. Hopefully that’ll be understandable after the following review.

First off, I’ve been writing an essay. Writing slows down my reading. That’ll be important below.

I’m going to use one of those little spoiler cut lines here. This is my idea of irony, because there’s no plot to spoil, since there's no plot at all. Oh, there's characters, and places, but if forty pages were missing from your copy, you wouldn't be in the dark.

(view spoiler)

That last bit might be some sort of existential point to all of this …if so I can’t remember. It was lost in the static. Frankly, I'd rather read essays about how this book reflects the French drive towards realism than recommend this to anyone.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the concept, or the occasionally pretty description, it's just that I had nothing but apathy for the whole of the book. Similar to how you might like something(s) in a catalog without caring about the nature of the catalog as a whole.

The upside: it was, for once, more rewarding to work on writing stuff than sit down with a cup of coffee and read. ...more

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Sep 03, 2007 Nick rated it it was amazing

A remarkable achievement. The book captures one moment in an upscale Parisian apartment building, the significance of that instant revealed only at the end. Every chapter describes one of the hundred rooms of the building (with the exception of one cellar), completely frozen in time. Hence, because everything is motionless, much of the book is pure description of books, paintings, chairs, shelves, ceilings, curios, blotters, menus, puzzles, ads, recipes, lists, and much, much more.

Normally, thi ...more

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Sep 08, 2014 Sean rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: available, favorites, oulipo

Beyond its status as the Ur-text of encyclopedic maximalism in postmodern literature, or its summation of the Oulipo movement, comprising a stunningly intricate structure of interlocking constraints (most notably the movement of the Knight's Tour as a formation for the gestalt architecture of the novel), Perec's crowning work is, at its core, a love letter to art, literature, the humanities—all the while acknowledging (and celebrating) their vacancies of telos outside of aesthetic measures. The ...more

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Oct 24, 2007 Patty rated it it was amazing

To that old imponderable question, "If you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could only take one book with you...?" I now have my answer. Because I think that it would probably take decades of rereading to completely exhaust this book. It's not that it's full of lofty or difficult ideas. It's just full. I was on about page 235 when suddenly realized that embedded within the sections, the book is rife with puzzles! I didn't go around trying to solve them, but I did congratulat ...more

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About Georges Perec

Georges Perec

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Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigra Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.

It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").

W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.

Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994. ...more

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“From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.” — 25 likes

“I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.” — 13 likes

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