Present Books Concering Life: A User's Manual
| Original Title: | La Vie mode d'emploi |
| ISBN: | 0879237511 (ISBN13: 9780879237516) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Paris(France) |
| Literary Awards: | Prix Médicis (1978), Mekka-prijs (1996), French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction (1988) |
Georges Perec
Paperback | Pages: 581 pages Rating: 4.22 | 6664 Users | 604 Reviews
Be Specific About Based On Books Life: A User's Manual
| Title | : | Life: A User's Manual |
| Author | : | Georges Perec |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 581 pages |
| Published | : | October 1988 by David R. Godine, Publisher (first published May 15th 1978) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. France. Classics. European Literature. French Literature |
Chronicle Toward Books Life: A User's Manual
Life: A User's Manual 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, an 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 more 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 detective novel.Rating Based On Books Life: A User's Manual
Ratings: 4.22 From 6664 Users | 604 ReviewsAssess Based On Books Life: A User's Manual
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 multiplyingAbandoning 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 Rices Interview with a Vampire and Marcel Prousts The Guermantes Way come to mind, so at least my abandoned novels are fairly diverse. With regret, 200 pages in, Im adding George Perecs Life: A Users Manual to the melancholy little list.
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
A remarkable achievement. The book captures one moment in an upscale Parisian apartment building, the significance of that instant revealed only at the end. Every chapter describes one of the hundred rooms of the building (with the exception of one cellar), completely frozen in time. Hence, because everything is motionless, much of the book is pure description of books, paintings, chairs, shelves, ceilings, curios, blotters, menus, puzzles, ads, recipes, lists, and much, much more. Normally,
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
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 more at peace. It's like Beckett's sucking stones section in Molloy: elaborate, infinitely detailed processes
George Perecs 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 seen...This glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Perecs canvas and
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