I Read Books: Life: A User's Manual

 

Life: A User’s Manual

A portrait of a (fictional) Parisian apartment building, each chapter corresponding to one room. As the chapters moves through the building in a knights-move type manner, we meet and meet again various inhabitants. We also learn about previous occupants, about how the room has been used, various events that have been more or less associated with items or people. The larger the apartment, the more times we enter it discovering more about it; the more closely interconnected the characters the more we meet who have new light to offer on various stories.

The major one is the story of Bartlebooth, a rich Englishman who, disillusioned at life in his 20s, came up with a plan on how to spend the rest of it. He spent 10 years learning to paint watercolours under the tutelage of a painter who lives in the building, then spent the next 20 years traveling all over the world from port to port, painting watercolours (almost) every 2 weeks, with the assistance of his faithful servant Smautf. (Starting in the 1930s, he is perhaps fortunate in his itinerary, spending the years of World War II in Africa and South America.) He sends the watercolours back to Gaspard Winckler (another resident) a craftsman who sticks the watercolour onto a wooden backing, then creates a jigsaw, using his skill to make individualised puzzles. Bartlebooth then solves the jigsaws, the paper is stuck back together with a special glue created by Georges Morrellet (another resident) and taken off the backing. They are then sent back to the port they were painted and the painting dissolved leaving the paper blank again.

For a variety of reasons (the novel describes the apartment block at one particular time, which as it happens is the time of death of Bartlebooth) this plan, which will return the paper as much as possible to it’s original state, leaving no trace of the endeavour, is doomed to failure. This is reflected in many of the other stories in the book.

The movement through the apartment building is reflected in the formal constraints the writer Georges Perec created for the novel. Each room is part of a ten by ten grid, which in turn had a relationship to lists of things that Perec had created before starting work, the items off the lists then appearing in the story section. The book itself likes lists; one basement is packed with supplies in case of emergency (many of the inhabitants have lived through World War 2 and occupied France with various privations) and lists of preserved foods, drinks and other household supplies are extensive. In a central chapter Valene, the painter who taught Bartlebooth, has an idea for a painting that would be the vertical elevation of the apartment block with the façade removed so we can see within; thus a painting that would be analogous to the book, listing stories that come both before and after it.

Is this then a game, or exercise? Perhaps so, though it works in it’s own way as a novel, or perhaps novels. Perec was part of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) a group who looked for constrained methods of writing*. That this novel is composed of things that are left incomplete, as indeed they must by picking a particular moment in time, seems relevant, though after reading it I feel there is little left unsaid.

Read This: Stories ranging from the mundane to the fantastic in a Parisian apartment block, and though the characters' efforts may be futile the story is not
Don’t Read This: Just a piling up of detail to fill in a grid

* Perec’s most famous novel La Disparition is written entirely without using the most common letter in French “e”; this was translated into English, also without the letter e, as A Void.