Life, a User's Manual

Front Cover
David R. Godine Publisher, 2009 - Fiction - 661 pages
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, 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
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Georges Perec was a French essayist, novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker. Born in Paris in 1936, the child of Polish Jews, his father died as soldier in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Much of his work dealt with themes of identity, loss, absence--including his most celebrated work, Life A User's Manual. In addition to being honored by the Prix Renaudot (1965), the Prix Jean Vigo (1974), the Prix Médicis (1978), and the French postal service (2002), both an asteroid and a street in Paris were named in his honor--as well as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday. David Bellos won the first Man Booker International Prize for his translations of the Albanian author, Ismail Kadare, and holds the rank of Officier in the Ordre national des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary membership in The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters.

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