Thirty years ago a colleague put a French paperback in my hand, saying 'I couldn't finish this. But you'll probably like it'. I'd heard of the author; a.
Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement.
Life A User`s Manual By Georges Perec Je
- Amazon.com: Life: A User's Manual (9780879237516): Georges Perec, David Bellos. Life is so short, says Perec. But with 'Life: A User's Manual'.
- L ife A User's Manual begins with a meditation on jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles? Indeed, jigsaw puzzles. It is preceded by a motto from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical.
- 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.
Life a User's Manual (the original title is La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David.
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LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL autor: Georges Perec editora: Vintage. sinopse: Sinopse não disponível. produto sob encomenda Saiba mais. previsão de entrega: por: R$ 69,90.
Life: A User's Manual 4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 · rating details · 3,990 ratings · 348 reviews 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 extraordinary 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 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. ...more 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 Médicis & 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. 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 Médicis & 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 has created here an intriguing puzzle– written under constraints, it's a fitting tribute to Raymond Queneau, the grand master of the Oulipian school of writing. From the wiki : "Perec also wrote Life A User's Manual using the Knight's Tour method of construction. The book is set in a fictional Parisian block of flats, where Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10×10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics and 10 rooms across, including 2 for the stairwell. Each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight's moves on the grid." Here's a visual of the 42 constraints' grid The Architext* – While a knight's tour is a solitary game, the art of jigsaw puzzling is not! The latter calls for an active author-reader relationship–the epigraph taken from Jules Verne, says: "Look with all your eyes, look", 'cause "every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other." "What makes LAUM an exemplary architext is "its almost complete interpenetration of theme and structure, so that to describe one is to describe the other", the novel is "set" in an apartment building on Rue Simon-Crubellier (but as we read on, we realise) that the book is the apartment building itself. According to Perec, the novel was partly inspired by a Saul Steinberg drawing of a New York rooming house with its facade removed (...), Perec writes, the "mere inventory– and it could never be exhaustive–of the items of furniture and the actions represented has something truly vertiginous about it" (...) (The map provided in the book) obscures as much as it reveals,for its erasure of the wall divisions within each apartment belies the fact that the building has a total of hundred rooms. Its elongated, rectangular form also disguises another crucial aspect of the book's architecture: when made square and superimposed upon the rectilinear grid of an architectural floor plan, Perec's original plan begins to resemble an enlarged ten-by-ten chessboard.(...)While the knight's tour is mapped out for the reader(...) each room visited can be placed, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, back within the frame of the building's architectural floor plan." The Lives of Others : Perec satisfies the voyeur in us– we are always interested in the lives of others–LAUM is constructed as a huge diorama, giving us a panoramic view of the lives of all the residents of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier: "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." The plot covers one day, nay, a single moment, in the lives of these people, frozen in time –something momentous has occured here but we don't know that yet. The flâneur-like narrator takes us on a tour of this building, room by room, place by place, using a knight's move on the chessboard. Perec brilliantly employs flashback & flash-forwarding techniques to cover in a single day, hundred years of history! – in the manner of Arabian Nights & Ovid's Metamorphoses, stories lead to stories & even more stories, thus effectively overcoming constraints of time & place. Lives intersect, sometimes casually, sometimes to damaging/lasting effect. The tenants come from different national/ethnic & socio-economic groups– the house thus becomes a microcosm of the world-at-large. Objects, objects everywhere, not a clue to be seen! These objectives are achieved through a perusal of objects & the characters' personal histories. The objects provide the setting & help us understand the kinds of people who live/lived there. In a way, imbued with history & emotions, they seem to have assumed a life of their own, & like Infinite Jest's entertainment cartridge, the puzzle/mystery in Life A User's Manual, becomes a mad chase towards various objects with which this book's universe is cluttered– but just as IJ is infinitely more than the search for that elusive object, LAUM too is ultimately a human drama played out on a vast scale. Sometimes, the objects are like bread crumbs leaving a trail ( which might as well turn out to be a false one!)– in order to arrive at the heart of the story, ultimately, you'll have to look beyond them. A Faustian Bargain – Perec could've called Bartlebooth, Ahab, but that would've been too obvious- he settled for Bartle(by)booth. Most of the characters here are having projects of one kind or another & eventually they all end in failures. The defeats are crushing, the victories small & ephemeral–so much so, that one is tempted to call it Life A Loser's Manual ! "There is a lot of loss in this book - lost love, lost fortunes, lost jobs, lost lives, lost hope - and what is probably the biggest loss in the book, the loss of time and evidence of existence represented by Bartlebooth's project (...) France, along with most of Europe, was torn asunder by that (world) war, split between the resistors, the collaborators, and the the not-sure-what-to-dos. In 1975, these survivors and the effects of those years were still fresh enough to account for the atmosphere found at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. (...)And so there is a certain pall that hung over the France of those years, and though Perec might not emphasize it too directly, there's no way his work or his characters can escape the reality of those times. There is a gravity in Perec that comes from a deep and heavy place. I don't want to project too much, but the general scarcity of joyous and humorous moments and silver linings and so on must have history as its source. In my edition, there is a short disclaimer from Perec right after the Contents that reads: "Friendship, history, and literature have supplied me with some of the characters of this book. All other resemblances to living persons or to people having lived in reality or fiction can only be coincidental." Normally, I would dismiss this as a legal requirement of the business world, but in this case, I read it as Perec acknowledging that this fiction is based on lives lived and events lived through - the good, bad, and mundane days of each of these individuals making up the mini-cosmos of the apartment building. Each of these individual stories could have taken place in any time and place - adjusted for cultural details, of course - making this more and more of a "User's Manual" for human life as each chapter rolls by.*" Like Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Perec has also immortalised in words, the teeming common life– their mundane, everyday concerns, their joys & sorrows, "absence of completeness, absence of perfection". And like Proust, Perec too has immersed himself in retrieving memories: "He tried to resuscitate those imperceptible details which over the course of fifty-five years had woven the life of this house and which the years had unpicked one by one: the impeccably polished linoleum floors on which you were only allowed to walk in felt undershoes, the oiled canvas tablecloths with red and green stripes on which mother and daughter shelled peas; the dishstands that clipped together, the white porcelain counterpoise light that you could flick back up with one finger at the end of dinner; evenings by the wireless set, with the man in a flannel jacket, the woman in a flowery apron, and the slumbering cat rolled up in a ball by the fireplace; children in clogs going down for the milk with dented cans; the big old wood-stoves of which you would collect up the ashes in spread-out sheets of old newspaper …Where were they now, the Van Houten cocoa tins, the Banania cartons with the laughing infantryman, the turned-wood boxes of Madeleine biscuits from Commercy? " 5 shining stars for the genius, the madness, and the chutzpah! Ultimately, it's about life in all its variegated forms. A sadness permeates this celebration of life, still it's a celebration, let there be no doubt abt that. A series of parables that teach us to laugh through our tears, for such is life! References: *1) "He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels."( From the author intro) *2) Constructing the Architext: Georges Perec's Life,A User's Manual by Peta Mitchell. *3) This review is dedicated to Jim – at Brain Pain, for the invaluable insights he brought to this read. ...more 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 seen... This glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Perec’s canvas an 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 seen... This glorious, delectable visual feast of a novel, is constructed in the manner of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Perec’s canvas and construct is a single Parisian apartment building. Across 99 episodic chapters he describes in meticulous and often intricate detail each and every room. And we the viewer are transplanted from apartment-to-apartment —if one were to view the building front-on like a chess board— via a single knight's move. A knight moves two squares parallel to one side of the board and one square parallel to the other side. Any such move always takes the knight to a square of the opposite colour. In 99 moves the knight can move across every square on the board... Ostensibly, as we traverse the building and the matrix of descriptive details within, we are watching the creation of a painting by Serge Valene, an old artist who has lived in the building for 55 years. A novel of such intense descriptive writing, you might think, would collapse in on itself devoid of personality or humanity. The opposite is true, for Perec also details the heartfelt life stories —through the ages— of every inhabitant of the building. This array of ornate detail serves to amplify each person's story. The macro details lead us down into the elliptical narratives of each inhabitant in sweeping cinematic style: through elaborate vintage keyholes, ascending up into antique chandeliers to look down upon classical sheet music atop a rare Steinway piano to traverse the musical staves and begin learning of the history of each note’s inscription and the hand that wrote them; and the train they were on; and the train passenger’s neighbour’s hat… and the story behind the hat maker… and on, and up and diagonally across… through time and memory... from apartment-to-apartment... piece-by-piece… the jigsaw... the picture... Life: A User's Manual can be read as a parable about the efforts of the human mind to impose an arbitrary order on the world. Or a meditation on memory... even the act of writing itself. This is a glorious book in both its inventive structure and its rich visual descriptions. ...more 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 experienc 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. Structured around a precise moment in time on 23 June 1975 and set in a Parisian apartment block, we are told in massive detail, chapter by chapter what is happening in each room in each apartment. As the novel progresses the residents of the apartment block mix and link with hundreds of other individuals, their seemingly random tales amusing, absurd, touching and tedious. The linking and layering of these short stories, the abundance of very precise lists detailing the objects in each room, the allusions, formulas and problem solving, the story lines, the keepsakes and objects that keep reappearing, the memories of the characters, are all interconnected, creating a remarkable pattern. The three appendices and the table of contents provided by Perec is an essential element to piecing it all together,and, the more I delved into the book, the more I realised, despite its simple expression, how astonishingly detailed and complex it was. The more you look the more is revealed and it is a book to be read more than once. On this, my first reading, I am content with the surprises my own memory has given me, recalling my own experiences and discovering a writer that was loved by generations of my family. ...more 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 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 create puzzles and layers and collections. (The basement of LUAM as subconscious, populating our self, which is essentially nothing, with survival gear, food, not for, but of thought.) Go places, paint a picture, adhere the picture to wood, cut it apart into a puzzle, assemble the puzzle, reconstitute the puzzle into a whole and make it as perfect as to be unknown as ever having been a puzzle, then finally, dissolve the painting until there is no evidence of the painting. Nothing to nothing is very much something. It seems that the book itself is a still life of the building. I wish I could paint so that I could take a decade to illustrate the details of the building. From LAUM: "In other words, Bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion. The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming—what should I do?—with an answer taking shape: nothing." ...more 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 li 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. Life is an account of a single day in a Parisian apartment block. The chapters move through the buildings from room to room in the way a chess-piece knight moves across a board. Fragments of information about the occupants’ stories appear alongside descriptions of objects filling the rooms. Stories spill out: an account of a painting can explain the story depicted, the life of the artist or a historical event tenuously connected to the picture. In reading I was torn between frustration at meeting yet another description of a table or empty room and intrigue at how all these stories might fit together. Perec treats the building like a mystery plot with a single figure at the heart of it, the artist Bartlebooth. Ultimately, the descriptions became too much. May the gods of reading forgive me, but I looked up the plot on Wikepedia to decide whether or not to keep going. The plot is this: Bartlebooth spent 20 years travelling and painting ports, then got these pictures turned into jigsaws. He spent the rest of his life putting the jigsaws back together. Once the image is assembled he destroys it, so nothing remains of his art. But tragically for Bartlebooth, he runs out of time and a few paintings are left behind when he dies. This is just too contrived to bear. I guess Perec wishes to make a point about life, how we fill it up with things, things remain and we don’t. Alongside the persistence of things, presumably there is the meaningless interconnectedness of life, like Derridean philosophy: every thing is known only by its relations to all the things it is not, identity being nothing more than a network of absence or non-being. Yes, I’m hoping that misunderstanding Derrida absolves me for abandoning this novel. Years ago I read Perec’s A Void, a novel written entirely without using the letter e. Writing under such a constraint is some feat in French, a language heavy in e’s, and the translator did a superb job replicating the game in English. But Perec is so absorbed in tricks, life finds no way into the novels. Lots of blurbs on Life: A User’s Manual compare it to Ulysses, but the comparison makes no sense to me. Every word of Joyce’s thrums with vitality, but Perec’s novel felt stifled by its rules and, finally, stifling. ...more About Georges Perec 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. 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 Médicis 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. 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 Médicis 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. David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994. ...more','url':'https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28293.Life','og_descr':'Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in it...