4.0
Life: A User's Manual
ByPublisher Description
Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec's "elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel" begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny—and 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 an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime,
is a symphony 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.
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, and problems of chess and logic. All are there for the reader to solve.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLife: A User's Manual Reviews
4.0
“The last chapter of the book starts with this line, "Je cherche en même temps l'éternel et l'éphémère." In English, this translates to, "I am searching for the eternal and the ephemeral at the same time." And I think that is about as good of a summary as I could offer on such a dense book; it's about everything and nothing; every person, room, book, painting, has a story that can be interesting or boring, finished or incomplete. It doesn't prescribe what to do with your life, only that you live. I don't think I'd ever recommend anyone read this book because the structure and style is so experimental, but I don't regret reading it.”
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