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.
Thanks to Nandakishore Sir for this recommendation.
A melange of stories, with the common thread of a building: roughly one chapter per room, (room defined broadly to include common spaces such as stairs etc). Some of the stories additionally are related to the project of 'the eccentric English millionaire' .
Between World War I and II, a tremendously wealthy Englishman, Bartlebooth (whose name combines two literary characters, Herman Melville's Bartleby and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth), devises a plan that will both occupy the remainder of his life and spend his entire fortune. First, he spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors under the tutelage of Valène, an artist who is a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, where Bartlebooth also purchases an apartment. Then, he embarks on a 20-year trip around the world with his loyal servant Smautf (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier), painting a watercolor of a different port roughly every two weeks for a total of 500 watercolors.
Bartlebooth then sends each painting back to France, where the paper is glued to a support board, and a carefully selected craftsman named Gaspard Winckler (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier) cuts it into a jigsaw puzzle. Upon his return, Bartlebooth spends his time solving each puzzle, re-creating the scene.
Each finished puzzle is treated to re-bind the paper with a special solution invented by Georges Morellet, another resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. After the solution is applied, the wooden support is removed, and the painting is sent to the port where it was painted. Exactly 20 years to the day after it was painted, the painting is placed in a detergent solution until the colors dissolve, and the paper, blank except for the faint marks where it was cut and re-joined, is returned to Bartlebooth.
Ultimately, there would be nothing to show for 50 years of work: The project would leave absolutely no mark on the world. Unfortunately for Bartlebooth, Winckler's puzzles become increasingly difficult and Bartlebooth becomes blind. An art fanatic also intervenes in an attempt to stop Bartlebooth from destroying his art. Bartlebooth is forced to change his plans and have the watercolors burned in a furnace locally instead of couriered back to the sea, for fear of those involved in the task betraying him. By 1975, Bartlebooth is 16 months behind in his plans, and he dies while he is about to finish his 439th puzzle. The last hole in the puzzle is in the shape of the letter X while the piece that he is holding is in the shape of the letter W.
The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on 23 June, 1975, just before 8 pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth. Nonetheless, the constraint system creates hundreds of separate stories concerning the inhabitants of the block, past and present, and the other people in their lives. The story of Bartlebooth is the principal thread, but it interlinks with many others.
Another key thread is the painter Serge Valène's final project. Bartlebooth hires him as a tutor before embarking on his tour of the world, and buys himself a flat in the same block where Valène lives. He is one of several painters who have lived in the block over the century. He plans to paint the entire apartment block, seen in elevation with the facade removed, showing all the occupants and the details of their lives: Valène, a character in the novel, seeks to create a representation of the novel as a painting. Chapter 51, falling in the middle of the book, lists all of Valène's ideas, and in the process picks out the key stories seen so far and yet to come.
Both Bartlebooth and Valène fail in their projects; failure is a recurring theme in many of the stories.
While Bartlebooth's puzzle narrative is the central story of the book, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant.
The narrative moves like a knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to it).
The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on 23 June, 1975, just before 8 pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth.
As may be imagined, this is a giant sized work ith 600+ pages, not merely in the number of chapters or pages, but in the number of characters, which proved (for me) impossible to keep track off, even after regularly checking back to the index. (Yes! The book has an index.)
Agreed, that the work is supposed to be a set of (pen) pictures, there is, for my taste, too much description of the contents of the rooms, especially
of the art work (pictures again as well as other objects), (perhaps for someone interested in art this might not be a problem, in fact it might be a positive); not to mention too many lists of various types, (which I confess I skimmed or even skipped over).
Also, there are apparently a number of allusions to other people, or stories, or possibly real events, most of which I cannot claim to have understood.
Nevertheless, most, (practically all) of the stories or anecdotes are interesting and many have penetrating insights into society and human nature and behaviour (Without any spoilers, eg., chapters 27, 88, 96 & 98).
A sample:
"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 its 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."
"To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object - we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle - is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element's existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing - just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up - which the English word puzzle indicates so well - not only loses its raison d'être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation."
What beautiful prose ❤️
The building’s inhabitants are revealed in a similar level of elaborate detail. The people one meets in this building are defined by their pasts. Though the main narrative of the novel takes place in the present of 1975, all the action occurs in flashbacks, as if the building were now frozen in time. One meets not only the present occupants of the building’s many rooms but also its past denizens as well, as if the story of each room were more important than the lives that took place there. But oh, the lives! Perec comes up with incredibly inventive biographies for the dozens of characters in the book, each more fascinating than the next. The 99 brief and varied chapters amount to a sort of modern Canterbury Tales. The stories are even indexed in the back of the book, with such entries as “The Tale of the Acrobat who did not want to get off his trapeze ever again” or “The Tale of the Neurasthenic Lawyer who settled in Indonesia. 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 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 building in the world. People come and go, have kids, plans, become rich, lose it all, get murderded, get happy, move away, come back, have another marriage, steal, buy, etc etc.
The entire premise of this book is the exercise in futility that we call life. It is brilliantly written, so funny it makes you laugh out loud, and its just life in all its stupidity.
Life: A User’s Manual is a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, celebrated for its innovative structure, depth of detail, and philosophical exploration of life. It is a novel that challenges conventional storytelling, offering readers a unique and intellectually stimulating experience. However, its complexity and non-linear narrative may not appeal to everyone. For those who enjoy literary puzzles and are willing to engage deeply with a text, it offers an incredibly rewarding reading experience.
This book is best suited for readers who appreciate literary experimentation and are intrigued by the idea of exploring life through the lens of an intricately crafted, multi-layered narrative.
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