Life, A User's Manual
Georges Perec
Read November 2007 to February 2008
Copy borrowed from M.
Essay written May 10th, 2008
M. loaned me this shortly before Thanksgiving, telling me that it's supposedly the best book ever written, although he couldn't verify that because he had never read it. In essence, he wanted me to read it and let him know if it was the best book ever written.
It was not. It had its moments, and it was certainly unlike anything I had ever read before. But once I researched it on Wikipedia and discovered the construction devices the author used, it lost me. After that every little detail I read about became contrived and meaningless. All this elaborate description of every object in every room of this apartment building, all only serving the purpose of some mathematical model of matrices and lists. Built around the Knight's Tour of the 10 by 10 space. La de da.
As a book of interconnected short stories it was all right. Some of the stories were very compelling indeed. But there weren't enough of them, and I don't feel like there was enough treatment of the main character, Bartlebooth. He was wonderful, but we didn't see enough of him. And then he was dead.
It gave a nice picture of twentieth-century Paris though, particularly of the present day, that is, 1980 or around there. Rather laborious though for the price of admission. 500 pages is a lot. It took me a long time to get through it all, a few pages here and there, over the course of about four months.
On the bright side, it introduced me, through the blurbs on the back, to Italo Calvino.
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