Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent and compassionate life
Review: 1982 was a bad year for intelligent life, just months apart the world lost its most important musician, Glenn Gould, and one of its most intelligent writers, Georges Perec. Fortunately, both men did bequest mankind with some significant food for intellectual and spiritual nourishment. Strikingly both men's best works, Perec' "La Vie Mode d'Emploi" and Gould's second recording of the Goldberg Variations, have some clear similarities. In both cases there is an almost obsessive attention for a work's main structure, a rigid set of rules on dealing with the individual chapters/variations, great expression of artistic freedom and most importantly a deeply felt and compassionate humanity.Similarities between this book and the Goldberg Variations are, of course, not so striking at all, when keeping in mind that Perec' masterpiece is dedicated to Oulipo's founding father Raymond Queneau. After being deeply moved by a performance of Bach's Art of the Fugue, Queneau came up with a new approach to literature with a strong emphasis on structure and the "language material". While Queneau's own "Style Exercises" may be the best known Oulipo work, Perec' Users Manual, digs infinitely deeper. Like all masterworks, the basic idea of the User's Manual is simple. Divide an imaginary apartment building into a two-dimensional 10x10 grid. Use a chess' knight's jump to move from space to space without visiting one spot twice and use a variety of other rules governing the various elements within the rooms and let the imagination run "wild".
Perec' uses the jigsaw puzzle as leitmotiv of this book. In a beautiful introduction, that contains one of the clearest and most insightful texts on gestalt, we the readers get the instruction to regard each of the 100 chapters as parts of a puzzle that only gain true meaning after full assembly. Next we crisscross the building, get detailed descriptions of each of the room's interiors and the history of current and/or former occupants. While the knight's jump approach necessarily leads to fractionation of the individual story lines - many of the inhabitants occupy more than a single space- Perec has gone out his way to keep the readers on track by providing various indices and tables of content. Using a variety of genres that were exemplified by writers varying from Poe to Proust, from Borges to Joyce, from Verne to Foucault, Perec furnishes the individual novels that constitute this book. Central is the story of the eccentric millionaire Bartlebooth and his quest to fill his life with the production of 750 750-piece jig saw aquarelles of port cities, the solving of the puzzles and their final resolution. Interspersed are the other novels that range from comedy to mystery. Yet, where the genius comes in is in the way both the structure and the contents come together in formulating Perec' own philosophy of life. Books are always ranked on the quality of their first line, yet this one scores high on my list of best final chapters. Indeed one of the great books of the 20th century. Based on the author's high and my increasingly limited command of the French language, I decided to read the original French version supplemented by Bellos' translation. This translation is very precise and provides the English reader with an exact transcript. Yet, the original text is definitely richer. To me the original is far more musical and whimsical and lacks Bellos' more clinical approach. The title gives a good example. User's Manual is indeed a correct translation of Mode d'Emploi. Yet, it lacks the secondary (?) meaning o "life, a way to use it". Strikingly, the head to head comparison revealed the glaring omission of a whole paragraph of the final chapter in the translation. Let's hope that this error can be fixed in future editions.
Rating:
Summary: A whole panoramic view of life as it is -and can be
Review: Although this is certainly an experimental novel, it is absolutely readable and fun. The layout is supposed to be taken from chess, with a knight jumping up on some squares which represent the appartments on the building map. Frankly, although ingenious, the scheme is not all that important to me. What truly fascinated me were the stories themselves, the full development of characters, situations, histories and sceneries. In every chapter, Perec gives us an introduction about how the appartment / room looks like. The descriptions may be long sometimes, but they are essential to the whole point of the book: to bring to life real people living in comprehensible, complete surroundings, and to make these easy to visualize. Some of the descriptions, in particular Mme. Moreau's dining room, are simply beautiful and innovative.
The book was completed in 1978 and the action of the stories ranges from mid-XIX Century until June 23, 1975. The final chapter, which gives us a photograph of what each inhabitant is doing at that precise moment (8 pm), is also very beautiful and moving. The book projects a humanity so rich and vivid, hard to find in most fiction. The stories intertwine while being totally independent, and the cast of characters is wide-ranging and believable even in the most outrageous ones.
The central story, which forms the backbone of the book, is about a rich young man, Bartlebooth, a typically eccentric Englishman who decides to devote his life to a single, useless, morally neutral and highly aesthetical project: along with his faithful servant Smautf, he will visit 500 seaports to paint acquarelles of them, and every 15 days he will send the pictures to Winckler, an artisan also residing in the building. Winckler will make puzzles attaching the paintings to a wood panel and then cutting the pieces, not in the mechanical proceeding common to commercial puzzles, but in an artistic one. Then, after 20 years of wandering the world, Bartlebooth will come back to Paris and dedicate the following 20 years to put the puzzles back together, then sending them back to the place where they were painted, to be chemically cleaned up: destroyed.
It would be too long to mention here all the stories that caught my attention, but suffice it to say that they are incredibly different in content and style. Supposedly, the styles mimic those of distinguished writers like Poe, Joyce, Borges, Calvino, Flaubert, Kafka and others.
It is truly a fascinating, delightful book and I think that every taste will find some unforgettable stories here.
Rating:
Summary: la vita, istruzioni per l'uso
Review: cosa vi aspettate dalla vita? cosa da un libro? non ci sono risposte facili ne' istruzioni possibili. quel che potete (ri)scoprire grazie a georges perec e alle sue care parole e' la dolcezza malinconica, la quotidianita' quieta e appassionata, l'equilibrio fragile tra estasi della vita e orrore della vita. perec ci educa al senso (che necessariamente si muta in non senso), ci ricorda l'importanza dello sguardo (leggete le sue descrizioni di interni...vi sembrera' di esserci passati in una delle stanze/storie del suo palazzo parigino), ci consola e ci condanna; e' tutta qui la grandezza della letteratura, in questa volonta' e capacita' di comunicazione che supera il tempo e le distanze e i differenti immaginari!
Rating:
Summary: oulipan masterwork
Review: Georges Perec constructed Life : A User's Manual in accord with a simple set of principles. Perec allowed these principles to trump the normal "laws" of how a novel should be constructed, and, in true Oulipan fashion, following the rules resulted in a novel which is utterly unique. The subject of the novel is a block of flats in Paris. Perec organizes the book around the floorplan of the building: he moves from room to room, describing the furnishings and the decor. With an eye for ever-smaller details, Perec shows us how the ordinary space of an apartment teems with an almost overwhelming complexity. As we tour the building, we begin to encounter the inhabitants, from the eccentric millionaire Bartlebooth to the master puzzlemaker Gaspard Winkler, and as Perec folds them into the narrative, he also regales us with stories from their past. He shares dozens of tales of every conceivable stripe: murder mysteries, fabulist yarns, stories of love and courtship. In this regard, Life: A User's Manual evokes Invisible Cities, another Oulipan novel, by Perec's friend and colleague Italo Calvino. In Invisible Cities, Calvino creates a series of cities that seem to contain everything in the whole world: here Perec goes one further, managing to pack the entire world down to the size of a single apartment building.
Rating:
Summary: oulipan masterwork
Review: Georges Perec constructed Life : A User's Manual in accord with a simple set of principles. Perec allowed these principles to trump the normal "laws" of how a novel should be constructed, and, in true Oulipan fashion, following the rules resulted in a novel which is utterly unique. The subject of the novel is a block of flats in Paris. Perec organizes the book around the floorplan of the building: he moves from room to room, describing the furnishings and the decor. With an eye for ever-smaller details, Perec shows us how the ordinary space of an apartment teems with an almost overwhelming complexity. As we tour the building, we begin to encounter the inhabitants, from the eccentric millionaire Bartlebooth to the master puzzlemaker Gaspard Winkler, and as Perec folds them into the narrative, he also regales us with stories from their past. He shares dozens of tales of every conceivable stripe: murder mysteries, fabulist yarns, stories of love and courtship. In this regard, Life: A User's Manual evokes Invisible Cities, another Oulipan novel, by Perec's friend and colleague Italo Calvino. In Invisible Cities, Calvino creates a series of cities that seem to contain everything in the whole world: here Perec goes one further, managing to pack the entire world down to the size of a single apartment building.
Rating: 
Summary: Dense and beautiful, with an unfortunate title
Review: Georges Perec loved language, and it shows. _Life_ is clearly
a labor of love. There are times when maybe the descriptions ramble, and you
may well find yourself into the fifth page of a description
of some piece of furniture, but if you don't keep track, you'll
never notice.
This is a difficult book to describe simply because it is so dense. At one level, it's a logic game; at another, it's an
exercise in linguistics; at another, it's simply poetry.
The translator, too, deserves kudos. Although I haven't read
the original, the translation, I suspect, has remained faithful
to the spirit of the book. Please read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Well, raise my rent!
Review: I just wanted to move into this apartment complex here at Amazon and put my name on the list of roommates who love this book. I finished the book today and find myself exhilerated at it's genius. Perec, along with Queneau and Calvino, prove that Oulipo isn't just a gimmick but a viable workshop in which great art can be produced that is both equally humorous and emotionally moving. Perec's prose is rich. There's more than enough humor and pathos in the book for anyone who's willing to carefully read a book that's not just rushing to tell a story, but to occupy it with some beautiful philosophy. It's as great as anything else I've read, including Faulkner, Joyce, Calvino, Balzac, etc. Top-drawer!
Rating:
Summary: read it (if you dare)
Review: i read it in Turkish translation... it is one of these "brick" books... what kind of a book it is? hmmmmmmmmm... the most breathtaking mystery i have ever read... imagine a book telling the story of just a second of an apartment house in hundreds of pages and you die to read the end of it... incomparable...
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! A Must Have Life-Changing Book
Review: I read this book when it was first translated in the USA - I saw the title on a shelf in our library and couldn't resist it. A decade later, images from this unique novel still haunt me, and when asked that infamous desert island question - this is the one novel I would take with me. Read it. Savor it. And don't miss the linguistic jokes he has woven so brilliantly into his tapestry.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! A Must Have Life-Changing Book
Review: I read this book when it was first translated in the USA - I saw the title on a shelf in our library and couldn't resist it. A decade later, images from this unique novel still haunt me, and when asked that infamous desert island question - this is the one novel I would take with me. Read it. Savor it. And don't miss the linguistic jokes he has woven so brilliantly into his tapestry.
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