Life: A Critical User's Manual Didier Fassin on Amazon.com.FREE. shipping on qualifying offers. How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Life: A Critical User’s Manual 'Life is a term, none more familiar. And one almost would take it for an affront, to be asked what he meant by it,' writes John Locke.
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| Author | Georges Perec |
|---|---|
| Original title | La Vie mode d'emploi |
| Translator | David Bellos |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Hachette Littératures |
Publication date | 1978 |
| 1987 | |
| ISBN | 978-0-87923-751-6 (1978 paperback, first English translation) ISBN0-87923-751-1 (1987 hardcover) ISBN978-1-56792-373-5 (2008 paperback, revised translation) |
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 Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as 'novels', in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, though Perec himself preferred to avoid labels and his only long term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.
La Vie mode d'emploi is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier (no such street exists, although the quadrangle Perec claims Simon-Crubellier cuts through does exist in Paris XVII arrondissement). It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity.
- 3Elements
Plot[edit]
Between World War I and II, a tremendously wealthy Englishman, Bartlebooth (whose name combines two literary characters, Herman Melville's Bartleby and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth), devises a plan that will both occupy the remainder of his life and spend his entire fortune. First, he spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors under the tutelage of Valène, who also becomes a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. Then, he embarks on a 20-year trip around the world with his loyal servant Smautf (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier), painting a watercolor of a different port roughly every two weeks for a total of 500 watercolors.
Bartlebooth then sends each painting back to France, where the paper is glued to a support board, and a carefully selected craftsman named Gaspard Winckler (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier) cuts it into a jigsaw puzzle. Upon his return, Bartlebooth spends his time solving each jigsaw, re-creating the scene.
Each finished puzzle is treated to re-bind the paper with a special solution invented by Georges Morellet, another resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. After the solution is applied, the wooden support is removed, and the painting is sent to the port where it was painted. Exactly 20 years to the day after it was painted, the painting is placed in a detergent solution until the colors dissolve, and the paper, blank except for the faint marks where it was cut and re-joined, is returned to Bartlebooth.
Ultimately, there would be nothing to show for 50 years of work: the project would leave absolutely no mark on the world. Unfortunately for Bartlebooth, Winckler's puzzles become increasingly difficult and Bartlebooth himself becomes blind. An art fanatic also intervenes in an attempt to stop Bartlebooth from destroying his art. Bartlebooth is forced to change his plans and have the watercolors burned in a furnace locally instead of couriered back to the sea, for fear of those involved in the task betraying him. By 1975, Bartlebooth is 16 months behind in his plans, and he dies while he is about to finish his 439th puzzle. The last hole in the puzzle is in the shape of the letter X while the piece that he is holding is in the shape of the letter W.
Structure[edit]
The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on June 23, 1975, just before 8 pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth. Nonetheless, the constraints system creates hundreds of separate stories concerning the inhabitants of the block, past and present, and the other people in their lives. The story of Bartlebooth is the principal thread, but it interlinks with many others.
Another key thread is the painter Serge Valène's final project. Bartlebooth hires him as a tutor before embarking on his tour of the world, and buys himself a flat in the same block where Valène lives. He is one of several painters who have lived in the block over the century. He plans to paint the entire apartment block, seen in elevation with the facade removed, showing all the occupants and the details of their lives: Valène, a character in the novel, seeks to create a representation of the novel as a painting. Chapter 51, falling in the middle of the book, lists all of Valène's ideas, and in the process picks out the key stories seen so far and yet to come.
Both Bartlebooth and Valène fail in their projects: this is a recurring theme in many of the stories.
Elements[edit]
Apartment block[edit]
One of Perec's long-standing projects was the description of a Parisian apartment block as it could be seen if the entire facade were removed, exposing every room. Perec was obsessed with lists: such a description would be exhaustive down to the last detail.
Some precedents of this theme can be found in the Spanish novel El diablo cojuelo [es] (1641, 'The Lame Devil' or 'The Crippled Devil') by Luis Vélez de Guevara (partially adapted to 18th century France by Alain-René Lesage in his 1707 novel Le Diable boiteux, 'The Lame Devil' or 'The Devil upon Two Sticks') and the 20th-century Russian novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Another well-known literary puzzle is Hopscotch (1963) by the Paris-resident Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar.
While Bartlebooth's puzzle narrative is the central story of the book, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant.
The narrative moves like a knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to it). In each room we learn about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about someone they have come into contact with.
Many of the characters at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, such as Smautf, Valène, Winckler, and Morellet, have a direct connection to Bartlebooth's quest. Thus, in those rooms the Bartlebooth puzzle-narrative tends to be carried further. Many of the narratives, however, are linked to Bartlebooth only by being related to the history of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier.
Knight's tour[edit]
A knight's tour as a means of generating a novel was a long-standing idea of the Oulipo group. Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10×10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics and 10 rooms across, including two 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. However, as the novel contains only 99 chapters, bypassing a basement, Perec expands the theme of Bartlebooth's failure to the structure of the novel as well.
Lists[edit]
An example of a bi-square. Perec used 21 larger (10x10) grids to distribute the elements of his 42 lists
The content of Perec's novel was partly generated by 42 lists, each containing 10 elements (e.g. the 'Fabrics' list contains ten different fabrics). Perec used Graeco-Latin squares or 'bi-squares' to distribute these elements across the 99 chapters of the book. A bi-square is similar to a sudoku puzzle, though more complicated, as two lists of elements must be distributed across the grid. In the pictured example, these two lists are the first three letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets; each cell contains a Greek and a Latin character, and, as in a sudoku, each row and column of the grid also contains each character exactly once. Using the same principle, Perec created 21 bi-squares, each distributing two lists of 10 elements. This allowed Perec to distribute all 42 of his 10-element lists across the 99 chapters. Any given cell on the 10x10 map of the apartment block could be cross-referenced with the equivalent cell on each of the 21 bi-squares, for each chapter a unique list of 42 elements to mention could be produced.
The elements in Lists 39 and 40 ('Gap' and 'Wrong') are nothing more than the numbers 1 to 10; if Perec consulted the 'Wrong' bi-square and found, for example, a '6' in a given cell, he would ensure that the chapter corresponding to that cell would do something 'wrong' when including the particular fabric, colour, accessory or jewel the bi-squares for the lists in group 6 had assigned to the cell/chapter in question.
Perec also further sub-divided 40 of these lists into 10 groups of four (the sixth sub-group, for example, contains the lists 'Fabrics', 'Colours', 'Accessories' and 'Jewels',[1]) which gave the story-generating machine an additional layer of complexity.
Another variation comes from the presence of Lists 39 and 40 in the 10th sub-group; Lists 39 and 40 would sometimes number their own sub-group as the one to be tampered with in a given chapter. According to Perec's biographer, David Bellos, this self-reflexive aspect of Lists 39 and 40 'allowed him to apply 'gap' in such cases by not missing out any other constraint in the group ('gapping the gap') or by missing out a constraint in a group not determined by the bi-square number ('wronging the wrong') or by not getting anything wrong at all ('gapping the wrong')'.[1] The 41st and 42nd lists collectively form ten 'couples' (such as 'Pride & Prejudice' and 'Laurel & Hardy') which are exempt from the disruptions of the 'Gap' and 'Wrong' lists that affect the first forty lists.[2] It is important to note that Perec himself acknowledged the lists were often mere prompts; certain chapters include far fewer than 42 of their prescribed elements.
Appendix[edit]
An appendix section in the book contains a chronology of events starting at 1833, a 70-page index, a list of the 100 or so main stories, and a plan of the elevation of the block as the 10x10 grid. The index lists many of the people, places and works of art mentioned in the book:
- real, such as Mozart
- fictitious, such as Jules Verne's character Captain Nemo
- internally real, such as Bartlebooth himself
- internally fictitious: the characters in a story written by a schoolboy, for instance
Reception[edit]
In The New York Times Book Review, novelist Paul Auster wrote, 'Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 46, leaving behind a dozen books and a brilliant reputation. In the words of Italo Calvino, he was 'one of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.' It has taken a while for us to catch on, but now that his major work – Life: A User's Manual (1978) – has at last been translated into English it will be impossible for us to think of contemporary French writing in the same way again.'[3]
In a list of nontechnical books he has read, computer scientist Donald Knuth referred to this book as 'perhaps the greatest 20th century novel'.[4]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ abBellos, David (2010). Georges Perec: A Life in Words, pp. 600–602. Harvill Press, London. ISBN1846554209.
- ^Bellos, David (2010). Georges Perec: A Life in Words, p. 601. Harvill Press, London. ISBN1846554209.
- ^Paul Auster, 'The Bartlebooth Follies', The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1987.
- ^Knuth, Donald. 'Knuth: Retirement'. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Life:_A_User%27s_Manual&oldid=876481197'
Life A Critical User S Manual
Life A User's Manual
by
Georges Perec
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Life A User's Manual |
| Author: | Georges Perec |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1978 (Eng. 1987, rev. 2009) |
| Length: | 501 pages |
| Original in: | French |
| Availability: | Life A User's Manual- US |
| Life A User's Manual- UK | |
| Life A User's Manual- Canada | |
| La Vie mode d'emploi- Canada | |
| Life A User's Manual- India | |
| La Vie mode d'emploi- France | |
| Das Leben Gebrauchsanweisung- Deutschland | |
| La vita istruzioni per l'uso- Italia | |
| La vida instrucciones de uso- España |
- French title: La Vie mode d'emploi
- Translated by David Bellos
- Winner of the Prix Médicis
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Our Assessment:
A : a monumental jumble of a modern masterpiece
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atlantic Monthly | . | 12/1987 | Phoebe-Lou Adams | ||
| FAZ | A | 15/8/2002 | Tobias Döring | ||
| London Rev.of Books | . | 10/12/1987 | Patrick Parrinder | ||
| The LA Times | . | 29/11/1987 | Richard Eder | ||
| The Nation | . | 3/8/2016 | Joanna Scott | ||
| The New Republic | . | 8/2/1988 | Sven Birkerts | ||
| The New Statesman | A | 13/11/1987 | Gilbert Adair | ||
| The NY Rev. of Books | . | 16/6/1988 | Harry Mathews | ||
| The NY Times Book Rev. | A | 15/11/1987 | . | 23/11/1987 | Paul Gray |
| TLS | . | 30/10/1987 | Gabriel Josipovici |
Life A Critical User's Manual Online
From the Reviews:
- '(L)etztlich gilt zur lustvollen Erkundung dieses Erzähluniversums nur eine einzige Gebrauchsanweisung: Man vergesse alle Formeln, Anweisungen und Systeme, schlage das Buch an beliebiger Stelle auf und lese, lese, lese.' - Tobias Döring, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
- 'Life is a giant inventory. (..) It is here that the achievement of Perec lies. (His translator, David Bellows has put the French into a wonderfully lucid and supple English.) His book, in a formal sense, is identical with its contents. In effect, it is made up of Bartlebooth's jigsaw pieces.' - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times
- '(A) work that is simultaneously capacious and intimate, forthcoming and wily. (..) Life, A User’s Manual demonstrates how inconclusive endings can be. The whole book may be seen as one long interruption, with the ongoing action inside the apartment building brought to a standstill by the author. Building from a single moment in time, looking into the past and the future, Perec has given us a refreshingly flexible model for narrative. He also gives us much to remember.' - The Nation, Joanna Scott
- 'What makes it ultimately so moving and lovable is that, though it fails (as it was meant to fail) as a user's manual to life (..) this world of things remains, secure and serene in its unquenchable thereness. Three cheers (..) for David Bellos' heroic translation.' - Gilbert Adair, New Statesman
- 'What draws one into this book is not Perec's cleverness, but the deftness and clarity of his style. (..) (A)part from a number of small lapses here and there, David Bellos seems to have done an admirable job. (..) [Perec] is not a writer who will appeal to everyone, but those who have a taste for the unusual, for books that create worlds unto themselves, will be dazzled by this crazy-quilt monument to the imagination.' - Paul Auster, The New York Times Book Review
- 'From the most straitened (and self-imposed) circumstances, Perec spins forth an infinite variety of entertainments, hundreds of tales, anecdotes, puzzles, mysteries, conundrums and diversions. Do the glittering pieces add up to a radiant whole? While the fun proceeds, this question seems irrelevant. At the end, it teases and haunts.' - Paul Gray, Time
- 'A great book, rather than a merely brilliant one (...) How sad then to have to say that the book has been translated and edited extremely carelessly.' - Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement
- 'Life: A User's Manual is very much the consummation of his achievement, bringing together stories and characters from much of his previous writing, and continually alluding to those writers who define the fictional space in which Perec's texts also aspire to move.' - Mark Ford, London Review of Books (2/2/1989)
- 'Furniture, shoe laces, dust bins, a romance, a crime, a hand reaching out for a newspaper, are told of in equal and apparently dispassionate detail. Yet bit by bit, a universe of colors and emotions, of human stirrings and failures is created. Time moves them all, and Perec's masterpiece manages to make time palpable, fragrant and sad.' - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times (4/11/1990)
- 'What is for me the most memorable novel of the last fifty years, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, is endlessly valuable because of its infinite promise: Perec invented a Parisian apartment block and bisected it, as if it were a doll's house, to describe lives that might have been lived in every one of its hundred rooms. The book's construction depends on an elaborate pattern, but its central brilliance is trick-free: Paris 1975, a particular building with cellars and garrets and stairways and salons and endless particular clutter.' - Daniel Soar, London Review of Books (9/3/2006)
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Life A User's Manual is probably the work Georges Perec is best known for. His biggest tome and most complex creation, it has generally been acknowledged as a modern masterpiece (and was, for example, selected as 'Novel of the Decade' by Salon du Livre).
Georges Perec was a tremendously playful writer, in all senses of the word. He was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle -- the 'Workshop for Potential Literature') from 1967 onwards, and he reveled in the word games and literary restrictions the group studied and applied to their writings (in his biography of Perec (see our review), David Bellos describes the group as beginning as one 'intent on the further study of (..) the overlap between, or intersection of, mathematics and poetry'). Perec had famously written a book without the letter 'e' (La disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void), created the world's longest palindrome (earning him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records) and, starting in 1976, was the crossword-puzzle setter for Le Point. More than most authors and word-lovers he twisted language and subjected it to the most rigid rules -- and managed to create marvelous things with it.
No Perec text is entirely straightforward, but his writing is not all merely fun and games. Things and W or The Memory of Childhood are just two of his many varied texts that show that his methods could readily lead to what can be considered fairly mainstream results.
Life A User's Manual, dedicated to OuLiPo's guiding light Raymond Queneau, combines all of the best of Georges Perec. In effect, it does combine all of Perec's approaches, games, and themes, and the result is quite extraordinary. It is a novel, a collection of many short stories, and an example of countless literary games. More than most books it defies (or at least poses an enormous challenge to) any effort at translation, but David Bellos has managed to render it into English without losing all too much of what Perec has done. Much has inevitably gone by the wayside, but Bellos' book does justice to what Perec set out to do and is an excellent book in its own right.
Told in six parts and ninety-nine chapters, plus a preamble and an epilogue, the novel also comes with three appendices -- a useful index, a chronology, and an 'Alphabetical Checklist of Some of the Stories Narrated in this Manual'. It begins with a jigsaw puzzle, and in fact the whole novel is a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that can stand on their own but that also fit together in a larger design. Jigsaw puzzles also figure prominently in the text, as one of the characters, Percival Bartlebooth (a name that Bellos describes as a being a combination of Valery Larbaud's A. O. Barnabooth and Melville's Bartleby) spends half his life painting pictures that he has someone mount and cut into jigsaw puzzles, in order for him to spend the second half of his life reassembling these puzzles (an idea that ultimately does not go exactly as intended, of course).
Life A User's Manual centers around a building (11 rue Simon-Crubellier) and its inhabitants, the narrative jumping around according to a grid design (explained in David Bellos' Georges Perec). Each has a story, and many of the stories naturally overlap. Perec complicates matters further by playing different stylistic games throughout the novel, imposing constraints that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not (and sometimes don't quite make the jump from French to English). There are also quotations woven into the text from numerous authors, including Borges, Butor, Melville, Harry Mathews, Nabokov, Stendhal, Jules Verne -- and Georges Perec.
Life A User's Manual is a huge, ambitious book (and the English version is already a very different beast than Perec's actual La Vie mode d'emploi). It is not easily described (an exegesis would probably cover several volumes of similar length), and it is probably not to everyone's taste, but for those who like serious fun in their reading matter Life A User's Manual is emphatically recommended.
Georges Perec was a tremendously playful writer, in all senses of the word. He was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle -- the 'Workshop for Potential Literature') from 1967 onwards, and he reveled in the word games and literary restrictions the group studied and applied to their writings (in his biography of Perec (see our review), David Bellos describes the group as beginning as one 'intent on the further study of (..) the overlap between, or intersection of, mathematics and poetry'). Perec had famously written a book without the letter 'e' (La disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void), created the world's longest palindrome (earning him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records) and, starting in 1976, was the crossword-puzzle setter for Le Point. More than most authors and word-lovers he twisted language and subjected it to the most rigid rules -- and managed to create marvelous things with it.
No Perec text is entirely straightforward, but his writing is not all merely fun and games. Things and W or The Memory of Childhood are just two of his many varied texts that show that his methods could readily lead to what can be considered fairly mainstream results.
Life A User's Manual, dedicated to OuLiPo's guiding light Raymond Queneau, combines all of the best of Georges Perec. In effect, it does combine all of Perec's approaches, games, and themes, and the result is quite extraordinary. It is a novel, a collection of many short stories, and an example of countless literary games. More than most books it defies (or at least poses an enormous challenge to) any effort at translation, but David Bellos has managed to render it into English without losing all too much of what Perec has done. Much has inevitably gone by the wayside, but Bellos' book does justice to what Perec set out to do and is an excellent book in its own right.
Told in six parts and ninety-nine chapters, plus a preamble and an epilogue, the novel also comes with three appendices -- a useful index, a chronology, and an 'Alphabetical Checklist of Some of the Stories Narrated in this Manual'. It begins with a jigsaw puzzle, and in fact the whole novel is a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that can stand on their own but that also fit together in a larger design. Jigsaw puzzles also figure prominently in the text, as one of the characters, Percival Bartlebooth (a name that Bellos describes as a being a combination of Valery Larbaud's A. O. Barnabooth and Melville's Bartleby) spends half his life painting pictures that he has someone mount and cut into jigsaw puzzles, in order for him to spend the second half of his life reassembling these puzzles (an idea that ultimately does not go exactly as intended, of course).
Life A User's Manual centers around a building (11 rue Simon-Crubellier) and its inhabitants, the narrative jumping around according to a grid design (explained in David Bellos' Georges Perec). Each has a story, and many of the stories naturally overlap. Perec complicates matters further by playing different stylistic games throughout the novel, imposing constraints that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not (and sometimes don't quite make the jump from French to English). There are also quotations woven into the text from numerous authors, including Borges, Butor, Melville, Harry Mathews, Nabokov, Stendhal, Jules Verne -- and Georges Perec.
Life A User's Manual is a huge, ambitious book (and the English version is already a very different beast than Perec's actual La Vie mode d'emploi). It is not easily described (an exegesis would probably cover several volumes of similar length), and it is probably not to everyone's taste, but for those who like serious fun in their reading matter Life A User's Manual is emphatically recommended.
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