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Life A User's Manual

By Georges Perec David Bellos
Life A User s Manual Life 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

  • Title: Life A User's Manual
  • Author: Georges Perec David Bellos
  • ISBN: 9780879237516
  • Page: 336
  • Format: Paperback

    • Life 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, and extraordinaryLife 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, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or sometimes quite ordinary From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.But the novel in than an extraordinary range of fictions it is a closely observed account of life and experience The apartment block s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the det

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    Life A User's Manual

    About Author

    1. Georges Perec David Bellos says:
      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 M dicis 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.A heavy smoker throughout his life, Perec was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981 and he died the following year in Ivry sur Seine at only forty five years old His ashes are held at the columbarium of the P re Lachaise Cemetery.David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec Georges Perec A Life in Words, which won the Acad mie Goncourt s bourse for biography in 1994.

    Comment 331 on “Life A User's Manual”

    1. Megha says:
      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 shrink [...]
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    2. StevenGodin says:
      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 wa [...]
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    3. Geoff says:
      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 us [...]
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    4. Stacy says:
      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 trul [...]
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    5. Chris_P says:
      Life A User s ManualI seek the eternal and the ephemeralHaving 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 belong t [...]
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    6. Lee says:
      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 at peace It s like Beckett s sucking stones section in Molloy elaborate, infinitely detailed processes eventually r [...]
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    7. Mala says:
      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 M dicis 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 Marvel Perec ha [...]
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    8. Emma says:
      I went in search for this book when I was in France recently My grandparents old house is like the Mary Celeste, frozen in time since their deaths some years ago, and is home to a dusty and unloved collection of French literature Without much effort I found an old and well worn copy of Life A Users Manual by Perec Finding this particular copy felt rather special, having been read by my grandmother, grandfather and father before me The novel is essentially an observation of life, of experiences S [...]
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    9. Nick Craske says:
      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 seenThis glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle Perec s canvas and construct [...]
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    10. Paul Bryant says:
      A pre reviewThis 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 Pierre Jeuno [...]
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    11. T for Tongue-tied says:
      How indescribably beautiful this book is Snuggled up to meticulously painted worlds full of dazzling colours and smells, my overwhelmed, word saturated head spins violently while my heart gives quiet love to every little detail statuettes, watercolours, books, ancient coins, gramophones, whispering silks and engraved chests every understated picture of what remains after everything has been lost I had never known such silence the hushed memory of faded lives and their stories, freeze framed in t [...]
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    12. Joshua says:
      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 varyi [...]
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    13. MJ Nicholls says:
      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 Everyman s [...]
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    14. Vit Babenco says:
      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 distinctly four tim [...]
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    15. knig says:
      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 like a [...]
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    16. Brian says:
      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 to creat [...]
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    17. Teresa Proença says:
      Procuro ao mesmo tempo o eterno e o ef mero No dia 23 de Junho de 1975, s 8 horas da noite, entrei no pr dio a que corresponde o n mero 11 da Rua Simon Crubellier em Paris Observei salas, cozinhas, quartos, caves, e vi espa os e vidas de centenas de pessoas que de, alguma forma, est o ligadas umas s outras como se as suas vidas fossem um puzzle gigante composto de belas, infinitas e min sculas pe as Encantei me, emocionei me, deslumbrei me, com as mais de 100 hist rias de mais de 1000 pessoas qu [...]
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    18. Kathleen says:
      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.L [...]
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    19. Christina says:
      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 got murdered, wh [...]
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    20. Jonfaith says:
      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.
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    21. Guido says:
      Il rischio pi grande, per un opera cos ambiziosa, che si innamori della propria struttura, trascurando il contenuto dopotutto questo libro ambientato, s , in un condominio parigino ma lo si esplora locale per locale dal bagno di un appartamento alle cantine, alle scale di servizio, a una sala da pranzo, all ascensore, alle camere di servizio e cos via seguendo le mosse del cavallo nel gioco degli scacchi per coprire tutta la scacchiera, visitando ogni casella tranne una, in questo caso e quindi [...]
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    22. Burak Uzun says:
      Yapboz par alar n n ok k sma ayr ld n , en ok bilinenlerden birinin de insan fig r ne benzeyenler oldu unu belirten bir yazar insanlar , hik yelerini birer yapboz par as gibi bir araya getiriyor Ortaya kan eser ne bir roman, ne bir yk kitab , ne bir ansiklopedi ne bir d n kitab Ortaya kan eser ne hi bir ey, ne de her ey Bunu da ba arsa ba arsa Perec ba ar rd herhalde.Elli g nl k maceram, her g n bir hik ye, bir b l m okuya okuya nihayete erdi Yaln zca kitab n sonundaki dizin k sm na bile baksan [...]
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    23. Adam Floridia says:
      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 1 The Coronation at Covadonga of Alkhamah s victor, Don Pelage2 The Russian singer and Schonberg living in Holland as exiles3 The deaf cat on [...]
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    24. David says:
      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 in some [...]
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    25. Emily says:
      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 that I could neve [...]
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    26. ΑνναΦ says:
      La catalogazione, l elenco e l elenco della spesa della cantina, della dispensa, del salone elevati a delizia narrativa Mai, mai avrei immaginato di divertirmi, incantarmi e perdermi cos tanto leggendo elenchi di cose e frattali di vite Il libro non di facile approccio, se non si fruitori della letteratura postmoderna che ha in Pynchon il suo sommo vate e in Amis un suo valido seguace, sar perch entrambi, a suo tempo, mi son piaciuti, che anche lo scoglio Perec stato virato senza intoppi Dopo le [...]
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    27. Jean-Marc Bonet says:
      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.
      Reply

    28. Ingrid says:
      Finito di leggere mi appresto a scrivere due righe qua e mi vengono in mente solo aggettivi originale, bizzarro, rigoroso, straordinario.Ma proprio letteralmente, fuori dall ordinario.Perch chi mai si prenderebbe la briga di scrivere per 500 e passa pagine di un palazzo di dieci piani e dei suoi cento appartamenti Chi mai si metterebbe a descrivere gli arredi, la disposizione degli oggetti nelle case, tic, vizi e virt delle persone che le abitano, andando a costruire cento enormi piccoli frammen [...]
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    29. Simona says:
      Il fatto che questo libro sia ambientato a Parigi gli conferisce, a mio avviso, alcuni punti a favore.Ma non solo la capitale francese a raccogliere consensi, molto di pi.Leggendolo si ha la sensazione di quanto Perec si sia divertito a scriverlo, a progettarlo e a idearlo.Partendo da un condominio, lo scrittore analizza ogni camera, ogni stanza, ogni inquilino fino a formare i 99 capitoli o sarebbe meglio dire le 99 stanze facenti parte del condominio.Ci che colpisce la maniacalit , l ossession [...]
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    30. Patty says:
      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 congratulate myself wh [...]
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