Brain Pain discussion
This topic is about
Life
Life, a User's Manual Spine 2013
>
Discussion - Week Three - Life, A User's Manual - Part Three
date
newest »
newest »
I'm paying less attention to figuring out puzzles, more to enjoying prose in this section. There are passages that are so very clever and outright funny, others touching and poignant. So enjoyable!
Mod
I'm right there with you!
It occurred to me last week while I was reading Part Three, that I will have to read this again from the beginning, with all the charts and keys and diagrams laid out next to me. For this first pass, however, I'm just enjoying the trip!
Are any of you getting a sense of parables, à la a holy book? The judeo-christian bible is really a series of short stories intended to guide followers through their lives by giving examples of early people and their struggles with good and evil. Isn't Perec doing the same thing??
Jim wrote:"Are any of you getting a sense of parables, à la a holy book? The judeo-christian bible is really a series of short stories intended to guide followers through their lives by giving examples of early people and their struggles with good and evil. Isn't Perec doing the same thing?? "That goes without saying! How/why else the book be called Life,A User's Manual ?
The histories continue but the surprising thing is that barring a few families like the Gratiolets ( who lost many male family members in the wars),the Albins( who lost their fortunes in the Syrian nationalist movement) & Paul Ebért (who was part of the French Resistance & was jailed), the Great Wars don't really impact the narrative here.Perhaps Perec thought that the plot was already convoluted enough with the residents' inner history to bother tagging on an outer one!
I'm mentioning this cause I was puzzled by the Altamont's overstocked cellar:
I checked the chronology & in May, 1951 "they move into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier"&
in Chapter 33,Basement,1,we read:
"The Altamonts’ cellar, clean, tidy, and neat: from floor to ceiling, shelving and pigeonholes labelled in large, legible letters. A place for every thing, and every thing in its place; nothing has been left out: stocks and provisions to withstand a siege, to survive a crisis, to see through a war."P.208
So this is just a hoarder's mentality,the problem of plenty! Nothing to do with a war or a crisis.
Most of the tales narrated in this book are those of failures- financially or otherwise- Monsieur Jérôme,Paul Hébert,the Albins,Bartlebooth, Marcel Appenzzell,Grégoire Simpson,the original building owners-the Gratiolets, Beaumonts,& so on.What is the purpose of the Grégoire Simpson story? Except the old man Troyan, nobody else cared about his increasing isolation! There's something so touching in the snippet that closes his story,a brief moment of pure happiness from his childhood, memories like these that one latches onto when all else is slipping away:"One day, well before his fatal hibernation had gripped him, he had told Morellet how as a little boy he had played drum major with the Matagassiers on mid-Lent Sunday..."P.318
Where is the silver lining? The humour in this book is so few & far between. ( For example, in last week's section Chapter Thirty-Eight,Lift Machinery,1- featuring Valène,Madame Albin, Raymond Albin, her fiancé, Monsieur Jérôme,stuck in the building lift for seven hours is so funny! I wonder how I would've behaved,were I caught in a similar situation– not so coolly I'm afraid !)
Would like to hear from other members what they found funny about this novel so far.
Perec so beautifully captures the mundane,petty issues of everyday life of the building's residents- anyone who has ever lived in a multistoried apartment,will know about complaints regarding water leakage from plants,misuse of common areas & so on. The simmering resentments between "the upstairs and the downstairs folks","the older versus the newer inhabitants"–"All that makes a pretty tranquil history, with dramas over dog-dirt and dustbin tragedies, the Bergers’ dawn radio and coffee grinder waking Madame Réol too early, Hutting still complaining about Gratiolet’s doorbell, or Léon Marcia’s sleepless nights which the Louvets find hard to bear."P.291
Some random impressions:Valène's silent love for Marguerite, Winckler's wife: "Valène declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile.Many times he dreamt of eloping with her or fleeing from her, but they stayed where they were, near yet far, in the warmth and in the despair of an insuperable friendship."P.324
Contrast it with the relationship of Paul Ebért & Laetizia Grifalconi ,Emilio's wife,who elope & then nothing more is ever heard of the woman.
So much is happening within the confines of this building– love,marriage,birth,loss,loneliness,revenge...
"All would return to dust."
Like Bartlebooth,Valène also dreams of tragedy on a grand scale- this image of the building's destruction is awe-inspiring but all that takes place here are petty squabbles. P.292
So many characters in this novel are having various 'projects' of their own– Bartlebooth,Winckler,Valène,Olivier Gratiolet, Cinoc & that pompous painter Hutting ( contrast his success with Valène's failure who was perhaps a better artist?)– & I look at their frustration & decide that for happiness it's better not to have any projects!
P.331: I think,so far,the Plassaerts are the only building residents who have been called "mean" in this book! ( The other meanie was Madam Echard towards her son-in-law.)
"The Plassaerts’ dominant character trait is meanness – methodical, organised meanness, on which they even pride themselves from time to time: (...)commit acts of unspeakable stinginess, such as pouring Belgian whisky into bottles bearing expensive labels when they have guests, or systematically scrounging sugar lumps from cafés for their own sugar bowl, or asking in the same cafés for the Entertainment Guide which they then leave by their own cash desk for their customers to use, or paring a few pennies off their shopping by haggling over every item."
Seriously,I wouldn't want to have anything to do with them!
About Monsieur Jérôme, "he consumed easily two or three detective novels a day." I think,he would've been right at home in Goodreads!
Btw,did anyone try out the "Dinteville Salad”?!
Chapter 56, On the Stairs,8. In Dr. Dinteville's office: "journal of linguistics with the following table of contents to be seen: "– Stephen Albert & The Garden of T'sui Pèn make an appearance!
Can anyone tell me who's the "famous American folk musician" with whom Elzbieta Orlowska has an affair during the 1968 Students' riots in Paris?
Mod
This has everything to do with war. Just because the war "ended" in 1945 doesn't mean the people feel safe. The shortages and economic shambles of Europe continued for a long time afterwards. My in-laws are WWII survivors and hoard food in four refrigerators, two giant freezers, many preserved foods and a large wine cave. I imagine they also have some francs hidden away in case the Euro fails.
Where is the silver lining? The humour in this book is so few & far between.
This seems like a reasonable representation of "life", and so normal in a user's manual, don't you think?
I don't know. Perec looks like such a funny guy- I was expecting lots of laughs. I know it's not cool but I'm a happy person & I like things to be happy around me.
Mala,I wanted to let you know how delightful and useful I find your comments. They are just wonderful and add so much to my reading experience. I only wish I could reciprocate more than I am able.
I did have a few complimentary thoughts on the "humorous" aspect which I blithely threw into the mix earlier. I ought better to have used terms like clever, witty or ironic. I feel that there have been times when Peroc has chosen a slight turn-of-phrase a bit for the fun of it. These choices often seem to be when he is working deeply within a constraint. I like when I can smile a bit.
Once again, thank you for your contribution.
Mark B wrote: "Mala,I wanted to let you know how delightful and useful I find your comments. They are just wonderful and add so much to my reading experience. I only wish I could reciprocate more than I am able..."
How nice of you! Seems I'm in competition with the likes of fellow Brainpainers like Zadignose & Larou regarding who can write the longest comment! So I fill my comments with nonsense & sometimes I get lucky & the nonsense actually makes some sense :p
You are right abt the humour in this book- it's found in little things- a look here,a gesture there,a situation,a turn of phrase– unlike the tragedies,the happiness portrayed here is on a lower scale. Does that mean that grief outweighs joy in real life as well? No,I don't think so.
Here's one such very charming visual image of happy domesticity- It made me smile very indulgently:
"Paradoxically for such a precise and measured woman, Marguerite was irresistibly attracted to jumble. Her table was an eternal glory-hole, always stacked with great amounts of useless equipment, piled high with heteroclite objects, invaded by a tide of muddle which she had to stem each time before she set to work (...)Only a cat could move amongst these piles without setting off a landslide, and, as it happened, Gaspard and Marguerite did have a cat, a big red tom they had first called Leroux, then Gaston, then Chéri Bibi, then, in a final aphetism, Ribibi, who liked nothing better than walking amongst all these things without disturbing them in the slightest, ending up squatting quite comfortably in them, unless he settled on his mistress’s neck, letting his paws hang lazily down on either side."P.321-22
Mod
I don't think that grief necessarily outweighs joy, so much as grief, pain, and tragedy tend to linger longer in our minds. We have to seek out the little things, just as we do in the book, and so, the User's Manual is right again!
Jim you express it so well! I agree "grief,pain,and tragedy tend to linger longer in our minds."Btw,I didn't react earlier to the war scale preparedness of your in-laws' pantry cause frankly,I was taken aback!
You must be eating a lot,Jim. Time to go on a diet perhaps :p
Mod
Btw,I didn't react earlier to the war scale preparedness of your in-laws' pantry cause frankly,I was..."
Luckily I only eat at their house on Sundays, otherwise I'd be quite the portly expat...
One of the reasons I mentioned the war is because of the central place it occupies in Perec's personal history. Father died in 1940 fighting the Germans, shortly before France agreed to being occupied. Three years later, his mother died - possibly in Auschwitz. Georges is raised by his aunt and uncle in post-war France and the long slow rebuilding of the continent. France, along with most of Europe, was torn asunder by that war, split between the resistors, the collaborators, and the the not-sure-what-to-dos. In 1975, these survivors and the effects of those years were still fresh enough to account for the atmosphere found at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.
My father-in-law, at age 21, spent three years in Nuremberg as forced labor. My mother-in-law was a teenager here in the country - each time the Germans came by on patrol, all the French men slipped into the woods to avoid arrest and the women were forced to deal with the searches and foraging, and other things I don't want to imagine.
There are war memorials in every city, town, village and hamlet, and there are plaques all over the country marking the locations where French citizens were executed on the streets by the Germans. One that stands out for me is in a tiny village not far from Lascaux that reads, essentially, "Monsieur and Madame X, two grandparents from this village, were burned alive on this spot on (date) for allegedly giving support to the resistance". There are thousands of these plaques all over the country.
And so there is a certain pall that hung over the France of those years, and though Perec might not emphasize it too directly, there's no way his work or his characters can escape the reality of those times.
War is horrible–everywhere. How stupid of me to expect laughs from a guy just cause he looks funny. I shd've read up on his life.Thanks for this very thoughtful post.Jim.
Mod
Thanks for this very thoughtful post.Jim."
De rien...
There is a gravity in Perec that comes from a deep and heavy place. I don't want to project too much, but the general scarcity of joyous and humorous moments and silver linings and so on must have history as its source.
In my edition, there is a short disclaimer from Perec right after the Contents that reads:
Friendship, history, and literature have supplied me with some of the characters of this book. All other resemblances to living persons or to people having lived in reality or fiction can only be coincidental.
Normally, I would dismiss this as a legal requirement of the business world, but in this case, I read it as Perec acknowledging that this fiction is based on lives lived and events lived through - the good, bad, and mundane days of each of these individuals making up the mini-cosmos of the apartment building. Each of these individual stories could have taken place in any time and place - adjusted for cultural details, of course - making this more and more of a "User's Manual" for human life as each chapter rolls by.
There is a lot of loss in this book - lost love, lost fortunes, lost jobs, lost lives, lost hope - and what is probably the biggest loss in the book, the loss of time and evidence of existence represented by Bartlebooth's project. He starts with a blank sheet of paper, he ends with a blank sheet of paper - ashes to ashes. In the end, all of the effort expended and money spent leaves no real trace that any of the paintings, nor the people who were in contact with the project, ever existed. I'm still processing the metaphysical meanings and mortal implications embedded in Bartlebooth's project...
Wow! Perec brings out the best in you! In my brief association with BP,after IJ,this is the book that has got you so involved...If you don't mind,I'm going to quote comment number 17 verbatim in my review but perhaps you shd use it in yours,it's only fair.
Great post! (view spoiler)
Mod
If you don't mind,I'm going to quote comment number 17 verbatim in m..."
Thanks for the props! Quote me if you want, but be sure all royalties make it to my Swiss account...
Good analogy with IJ. There's a similar depth of feeling in this book, which is what I suppose I'm responding to. At first glance, we have some wacky apartment puzzle with some sort of mathematical problem to solve, but it quickly becomes something else. I'm quite impressed with Perec and will certainly be reading more of him in the future.
(view spoiler)
I'm pretty late with this gem because I fell behind with this book, but I noticed some wordplay in Chapter 51, where there's a list of stories and events related to the tenants.There's three lists. In the first, the last letter of the first line is E. E is also the second-to-last letter of the second line, and the third-to-last of the third line. This continues all the way until the last line, which begins with E.
The next list does the same thing with G; the third and final list uses O.
"EGO" !!!!
Is it the same in the French version?
And the 180th line of this game is missing! Suspicious.
Mod
The French version does it with a, m, e. With the dicritical mark over the a, it becomes "âme" which is "soul" in English.
And the 180th line of this game is missing! Suspicious.
Just like the missing 1000th line of the poem in Pale Fire??!
Monsieur Jérôme’s final years are bitter, Doctor Dinteville’s waiting room…
…et les histoires continuer…