Life: A User's Manual

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Yes, it's a good read and structurally moving with a near perfect match of form and content. Yet it is no where close to Joyce who still reigns supreme.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece with terrifying craftsmanship
Review: You can read more than a dozen of raving reviews of this book; why another one? I agree with most of what is being said: This book is a genuine masterpiece, it is one of the books that you will want to return again and again. What I would like to point out is the amazing craftmanship that is lying under the surface of this book: In line with the principles of Oulipo, Perec wrote this book based on several strict mathematical constraints. The narration moves between the flats of the apartment as a knight moves on a chess board, never entering a square twice; Perec had 21 pairs of lists each of 10 elements (colours, actions, books, musical styles, errors, omissions...) each distributed to the chapters based on Latin Squares. You do not have to care about any of these to enjoy this book -- all these games do not disturb the flow of the stories at all. But when you start trying to solve these puzzles, you will realise the enormous amount of work that was put into this book and you will start to see Perec as one of the genuine literary geniuses of our times.