Discussion - Week Five - Life, A User's Manual - Part Five & Six

[Jim]

This discussion covers Part Five and Six, p. 461 – 569
Conclusions / the book as a whole


Having read this user’s manual, do we better understand Life?

[Mala]

Hélène Brodin's revenge against her husband's killers seems very melodramatic. She seems like the Bride from Tarantino's Kill Bill series.
Perec gives us lessons in hotel management! This one brought a chuckle:
"A good hotel, they believed, was one where a client can go out if he wants, and not go out if going out is a burden for him. Consequently, the primary characteristic of the hotels Marvel Houses International planned to build was that they would include intra muros everything that a demanding, wealthy, and lazy clientele could wish to see or to do without having to go outside, which could not fail to be their wish in the case of the majority of North American, Arab, and Japanese visitors who feel obliged to do Europe and its cultural treasures from end to end but who do not for all that necessarily have any wish to foot-slog along miles of museum corridors or to be carted uncomfortably around the lung-damaging traffic jams of Saint-Sulpice or Place Saint-Gilles."P.537

The laughs continue with Perec taking a dig at our pureed, pulpified, instant gratification seeking consumerist culture:
"clients of any one of the new Marvel Hostelleries would have at their disposal not only their beach, their tennis court, their heated pool, eighteen-hole golf course, riding stable, sauna, marina, casino, nightclub, boutiques, bars, newsstands, cigarette shop, travel agency, and bank, as in any run-of-the-mill four-star, but they would also have access to their very own ski slope, chairlift, skating rink, sea bed, surf waves, safari, giant aquarium, art gallery, Roman ruins, battlefield, pyramid, Romanesque church, Arab market, desert fort, cantina, Plaza de Toros, prehistoric cave, Bierstube, street party, Balinese dancers, etc., etc., etc., and so on and so forth."

[Mala]

The Altamonts' back story is so sad- who would've thought! Cyrill's fate had already been revealed earlier on in the narrative.(view spoiler)[ His wife shot him dead. (hide spoiler)]
I was curious abt the letter that Cyrill Altamont's daughter finds discarded in the trash- in it he recounts that fateful day in London & the people he meets & the stories he overhears- some how they seemed like allusions to something,did anyone get those references?

Abt Bartlebooth's troubles with art critic Beyssandre : they had been hinted all along- now they come to a head. Continuing with the Faust analogy,is there a character similar to him in that legend? I read Marlowe's play long ago & it left a lukewarm impression so I don't remember the details.

[Mala]

A question to all fellow readers:
How important are "objects" in this book & how far do they serve the writer's purpose in imparting life lessons? I'm asking this cause when I come across a passage like this–"The bedroom is already a dead man’s room, and furniture, objects, and knickknacks already seem to be awaiting this coming death with polished indifference, standing in their proper places, properly clean, fixed for all time in impersonal silence: ", it seems that indeed they are integral to the tale & thus one finds a plethora of parody/homage reviews but then what abt the human factor?
Wasn't Infinite Jest more than just abt the eponymous cartridge?

[Mala]

Dr.Dinteville's backstabbing by Professor LeBran-Chastel is so tragic,yet such tales are often heard of in the academic circles. Be careful whom you give your manuscript to for an honest opinion!

The Réols' story could be a signature tune for this book– pushed to the limit to get a home improvement welfare scheme approved from Marcel Réol's office,the slothful bureaucratic functioning of which is the stuff of nightmare,the turn around happens when they had lost all hope- how true of life,the vicissitudes,the sweet victory!

[Mala]

Bartlebooth's death is given a mythic treatment- just as on JFK's assassination day,Americans remembered where they were & what they were doing, so are the residents of the building captured in time.
Why did Valène's dream project not come to fruition? Does the writer want to convey that Life can't really be captured? In Patrick White's The Vivisector , the protagonist,an artist's ambition is to capture life in all its meaning,he dies working on that huge canvas yet if I remember correctly,the text didn't really tell what was painted on that canvas. Wasn't the achingly beautiful collage/montage of the residents & their various activities on the twenty-third of June,nineteen seventy-five,pointing to this fact? Yet,unlike Bartlebooth,Valène died peacefully– what was the reason of that contrast?
"A large square canvas with sides over six feet long stood by the window, halving the small area of the maid’s room in which he had spent the largest part of his life. The canvas was practically blank: a few charcoal lines had been carefully drawn, dividing it up into regular square boxes, the sketch of a cross-section of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit." P.624

Perec constructed a 10/10 plan chart for this book,by that logic,there should've been hundred chapters, yet, in a masterful stroke, he lets his 'project' be incomplete both as a commentary on the fictional projects depicted in the book & the nature of life's projects in general– does that make this book a failure? Absolutely not.
Dito for the message/lesson of this book– despite failures and obstructions, Life goes on,should go on. A gem of a book.

[Sosen]

D'oh! It took me about a few weeks (and one sleepless night) to realize that the last puzzle piece was Smautf's revenge. I don't even remember what Bartlebooth did to him, but that seems like some harsh revenge.

That raises a lot of questions: Did Smautf know he was going to die? Did he know his trick would kill Bartlebooth? Was there actually a solution to the puzzle? I say: yes / no / no.