Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
Reading Georges Perec’s book A Life: A user’s A User’s Manual: An Introduction one has the feeling of looking through a keyhole, observing every single detail of the lives, secrets and passions of the occupants of an apartment block in Paris.
What draws me to this book is not so much Perec’s writing style, which is raw and beautiful, but his ability to create worlds, the comfort with which he unfolds stories and mysteries, riddles and puzzles. Room by room, he reveals an extraordinary cast of characters in a series of ordinary, strange, and funny stories.
One of the building’s occupants, an eccentric English millionaire, has dedicated 50 years of his life on painting watercolours and making puzzles from them.
"Bartlebooth’s aim was for nothing, nothing at all, to subsist, for nothing but the void to emerge from it, for only the immaculate whiteness of a blank to remain, only the gratuitous perfection of a project entirely devoid of utility."
There is a young trapeze artist who had become a celebrity because of his talent for staying on his trapeze for hours at a stretch. Finally, he did not want to get off it ever again. A young ethnographer who left alone for Sumatra to find a tribe of mysterious people. A woman who takes revenge for her husband’s murder by killing his murderers, one after the other. A tale of a judge and his wife who took up thieving. A tale of an Art critic who was looking for masterpieces. An entire microcosm of interlink lives, passions and betrayals, crimes and revenges, fortunes lost, mysteries never solved, puzzles and problems of logic, brought to life in this Paris apartment.
Life will not appeal to everyone. For me it was a fascinating experience, so much that I made my own plan with all the residents of the building block at 11, rue Simon-Cbubellier, previous and current.
Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 46.
11, rue Simon-Crubelier - floor plan
