Life, a User's Manual"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."--Boston Globe 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 A User's Manual 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 individual stories; 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. |
Contents
One On the Stairs I 36 | 3 |
Three Third Floor Right 1 ΙΟ | 13 |
Six Breidel Servants Quarters 1 | 25 |
Fourteen Dinteville I | 49 |
Seventeen On the Stairs 2 | 59 |
Nineteen Altamont I | 66 |
TwentyOne In the Boiler Room I | 73 |
TwentyTwo Entrance Hall 1 | 81 |
Sixty Cinoc I | 285 |
SixtyOne Berger I | 291 |
SixtyThree Service Entrance | 300 |
SixtyFive Moreau 3 | 307 |
SixtySix Marcia 4 | 318 |
SixtySeven Basement 2 | 325 |
Seventy Bartlebooth 2 | 331 |
SeventyOne Moreau 4 | 340 |
TwentyThree Moreau 2 | 95 |
TwentySix Bartlebooth 1 | 113 |
TwentyNine Third Floor Right 2 ІЗІ | 131 |
ThirtyTwo Marcia 2 | 151 |
ThirtySix On the Stairs s | 166 |
FortyOne Marquiseaux 3 | 179 |
FortyFive Plassaert 1 | 195 |
FortyEight Madame Albin | 210 |
The FiftyFirst Valène Servants | 226 |
FiftyTwo Plassaert 2 | 234 |
FiftyThree Winckler 3 | 241 |
FiftyFour Plassaert 3 | 247 |
FiftyFive Fresnel Servants | 254 |
FiftySix On the Stairs 8 | 262 |
FiftyEight Gratiolet I | 271 |
SeventyThree Marcia s | 348 |
SeventyFour Lift Machinery 2 | 358 |
SeventySix Basement 4 | 365 |
SeventyEight On the Stairs 10 | 371 |
SeventyNine On the Stairs 11 | 380 |
EightyOne Rorschach 4 | 393 |
EightyFour Cinoc 2 | 409 |
EightyEight Altamont s | 436 |
Ninety Entrance Hall 2 | 451 |
NinetyFour On the Stairs 12 | 465 |
NinetySeven Hutting 4 | 480 |
NinetyNine Bartlebooth s | 493 |
Chronology | 565 |
Postscript | 579 |