Life, a User's ManualOver 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, Boston Globe, and others as "one of the great novels of the century." We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User's Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future. 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. Structured around a single moment in time "€" 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 "€" 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 is 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 formula. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel. |
Contents
Seven Morellet | 20 |
Seventeen On the Stairs 2 | 66 |
Nineteen Altamont 1 | 75 |
TwentyOne In the Boiler Room 1 | 83 |
TwentyTwo Entrance Hall 1 | 93 |
TwentyThree Moreau 2 | 109 |
TwentyFour Marcia 1 | 116 |
TwentySix Bartlebooth 1 | 128 |
SixtyOne Berger 1 33 | 330 |
SixtyTwo Altamont 3 33 4 | 340 |
SixtyFive Moreau 3 | 347 |
SixtySix Marcia 4 | 359 |
SixtySeven Basement 2 | 367 |
Seventy Bartlebooth 2 | 375 |
SeventyOne Moreau 4 | 385 |
SeventyTwo Basement 3 359 | 405 |
TwentySeven Rorschach 3 | 135 |
TwentyEight On the Stairs 3 | 142 |
TwentyNine Third Floor Right 2 | 148 |
ThirtyOne Beaumont 3 | 155 |
ThirtyTwo Marcia 2 | 173 |
ThirtyFour On the Stairs 4 | 180 |
ThirtySix On the Stairs 5 | 190 |
Forty Beaumont 4 | 199 |
FortyOne Marquiseaux 3 | 205 |
FortyFour Winckler 2 | 216 |
FortyFive Plassaert 1 | 222 |
FortySix Monsieur Jerome | 231 |
FortyEight Madame Albin | 239 |
Fifty Foulerot 3 | 250 |
The FiftyFirst Valerie | 257 |
FiftyTwo Plassaert 2 | 265 |
FiftyThree Winckler 3 2 74 | 280 |
FiftyFive Fresnel | 287 |
FiftySix On the Stairs 8 | 297 |
FiftyEight Gratiolet 1 | 307 |
FiftyNine Hutting 2 | 314 |
Sixty Cinoc 1 | 324 |
SeventySix Basement 4 | 413 |
SeventyNine On the Stairs 11 | 429 |
EightyOne Rorschach 4 | 444 |
EightyThree Hutting 3 | 450 |
EightyFour Cinoc 2 | 463 |
EightyFive Berger 2 | 469 |
EightySeven Bartlebooth 4 | 476 |
EightyEight Altamont 5 | 493 |
EightyNine Moreau 5 | 506 |
NinetyOne Basement 5 | 515 |
NinetyThree Third Floor Right 3 | 525 |
NinetyFive Rorschach 6 | 531 |
NinetySix Dinteville 3 | 538 |
NinetySeven Hutting 4 | 546 |
NinetyNine Bartlebooth 5 | 560 |
Epilogue | 567 |
Index | 573 |
Chronology | 639 |
Alphabetical Checklist | 649 |
Postscript | 655 |