Georges Perec’s 1978 ‘Life – A User’s Manual’ is, as the title suggests, an unusual novel. It tells the stories of the inhabitants of a block of 30 apartments at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, Paris over the course of 23 June 1975, 140 years, and some 500 pages. Each chapter is set in a different apartment within the block.
Almost (almost) nothing of note happens on 23 June 1975 – there are preparations for a dinner party for those attending. The narrator describes lots of empty rooms. Instead we gradually discover the past intertwined lives of the inhabitants – and their possessions. There is much of Perec’s typically minutely described and detailed inventories of the contents of rooms.
Narrative flow is constantly disrupted by stories of incidental characters to which a 60 page index provides an invaluable guide. Stories within stories flourish – a typical device is to enter a room, begin to describe its contents, then to focus on a photograph of someone painting a landscape and to spend the rest of the chapter telling the story of the characters depicted in this painting. An appendix catalogues some 100 stories ‘narrated in this manual’. A chronology traces the lives of the characters over 1833-1975.
How are you to approach reading a book like this? Starting at the beginning seems a very conventional formula.
Two stories hold the book together and give it its degree of momentum. Valene, a painter, imagines a single painting that will capture all of the lives of the inhabitants of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier and their histories (the novel, in essence, is his planning activity). His sometime student Bartlebooth travels the world in order to paint 500 watercolours of harbours which will be turned into wooden jigsaws by his neighbour Winckler, then re-assembled by Bartlebooth at the rate of one every two weeks. Upon completion the each jigsaw/painting will be glued together, separated from its wooden backing and then transported to the site of its creation where it will be dipped in a solution to dissolve the paint leaving for posterity only the perfectly reconstituted blank canvas.
What books have you been reading recently (or even not recently) that you think are amazing/interesting/unusual and would recommend others to read?
