"Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec and David Bellos

Sharad ponkshe: 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

India on Sep 26, 2023

Martin: If Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is about the universality of a single day in a single human life, if James Joyce’s Ulysses is about the universality of a single day in the life of humanity, and if Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is about the universality of a dream in a single night, then Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual is about the universality of a single moment -- a monument to the moment. If the framework of all of these is the universality of human life, it is the way that one fills in the framework that makes all the difference in an author's perspective. Time is not a clock; time is a force that drives everything forward. Woolf’s version is stream of consciousness, a relay race that exchanges consciousness between observers, filled with feelings of regret and sadness for a past that might have been. Perec’s version has humor and sadness, more than an ordinary share of suicides, the lonely and eccentrics, people who have traveled to places obscure and far away, so that even if everything is taking place in a now in an apartment building in Paris, the entire world of humanity is encompassed by the lives and memories past of all its residents and all the places...

United States on Jun 23, 2023

Karl Janssen: 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...

United States on Jan 21, 2022

Mac McAleer: ONE The Reading
I knew that this book would have “an angle” as the author, Georges Perec, was a member of Oulipo (1), an experimental writing group. It was also quite a fat paperback, so I started reading it with trepidation, wondering how far I would get before I gave up. I was surprised to find that I ploughed through it quite happily, partly because it contains bite-sized stories that are easy to digest. However, if you are looking for a conventional work of fiction you will be disappointed, bored and probably a little angry.

TWO The structure
The book is structured around the apartments in a Paris building (2). It describes the contents and current and past residents of these apartments (4). Often these descriptions lead to anecdotes and tall stories. These are coloured by the author’s fondness for detective stories and puzzles. The chapters are numerous and a few of the stories are continued across chapters (5).

THREE The book
The book has 99 chapters divided into 6 parts followed by a one page Epilogue (giving 100 chapters in all). The chapters are short. Each concerns a place, usually an apartment or a room in an apartment, but it can also be on...

United Kingdom on Apr 04, 2016

tallmanbaby: If you share the author’s fondness for the glacial pacing of Proust and Laurence Sterne’s willingness to play with form then you are likely to enjoy this. In essence the book describes the individual rooms within a fictional tenement block. It is also peppered with stories, in the manner of Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Unlike Proust and Sterne I could detect no trace of Potocki in the book.

This is a book where not a great deal happens, however it drifts along in an amiable fashion. It was written according to certain strictures, which seem to have inspired rather than constrained the author. If you are about to give up on it, I would recommend reading Chapter 88 which is beautifully observed and written.

I really loved it all, however by the end, the hint of melancholy had become quite doomladen, with little of the sprightly tone that had prevailed before.

United Kingdom on Sep 30, 2015

lushchica: 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...

United Kingdom on Mar 18, 2013

Shami Ghosh: 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.

Canada on Sep 07, 2007