Present Books Toward Life: A User's Manual
| Original Title: | La Vie mode d'emploi |
| ISBN: | 0879237511 (ISBN13: 9780879237516) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Paris(France) |
| Literary Awards: | Prix Médicis (1978), Mekka-prijs (1996), French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction (1988) |
Georges Perec
Paperback | Pages: 581 pages Rating: 4.22 | 6664 Users | 604 Reviews
List Containing Books Life: A User's Manual
| Title | : | Life: A User's Manual |
| Author | : | Georges Perec |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 581 pages |
| Published | : | October 1988 by David R. Godine, Publisher (first published May 15th 1978) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. France. Classics. European Literature. French Literature |
Explanation Supposing Books Life: A User's Manual
Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.
Rating Containing Books Life: A User's Manual
Ratings: 4.22 From 6664 Users | 604 ReviewsWrite-Up Containing Books Life: A User's Manual
Last night after I had finished reading this book, there still lingered a smile on my face. I had read last 100-ish pages in a rush. It was only after I finished reading and put the book down that I realized that I was going to miss this charming book.After hearing out little anecdotes and life stories of a multitude of characters, after reliving moments of their lives through their stories, it is now time to say our goodbyes. I stand at the doorstep waving my hand and watching those figuresBeyond its status as the Ur-text of encyclopedic maximalism in postmodern literature, or its summation of the Oulipo movement, comprising a stunningly intricate structure of interlocking constraints (most notably the movement of the Knight's Tour as a formation for the gestalt architecture of the novel), Perec's crowning work is, at its core, a love letter to art, literature, the humanitiesall the while acknowledging (and celebrating) their vacancies of telos outside of aesthetic measures. The
List of items in my bathroom: abacus, bouzouki once strummed by Warren Ellis, cauliflowers in brocade, Dungeons & Dragoons strategy wargame for Windows 95, elf ears, Farsi medical dictionary, gorgonzola, Hunter S. Thompson commemorative pineapple, inkwell, Jenga set, knitting needle made from yarn, Lemsip in cherry and chocolate flavours, mangle, nachos, octopus-patterned duvet cover, Peter Andre poster circa Mysterious Girl, quicksand, rum, salsa shoes, Total Recall 4-DVD set, Ulysses in
Lets be clear from the outset, Life a Users Manual is my favourite book of all time. It's everything a novel should or ever could be. Big characters, ripping yarns, wonderful descriptions, word play, structural experimentation and a sad truth at its heart... Its an existentialist work, in essence, tempered by its humanitarian outlook, but a book nonetheless about the pointlessness of human endeavour. The labours of the many characters contained here generally come to naught. And its a book about
i may have mentioned this before, but i had an ephiphanal reader experience last fall. last fall i was lucky enough to score a ticket to hear salman rushdie read at cornell. the experience left me not only with a hankering to read sir rushdie, but also to make a solemn promise to myself to read "less crap." a disclaimer: i don't think that any of what i read is actually "crap" but that my promise to myself was invoking rather a desire to put myself forward at least a fraction of the distance
By about page 200, this was firmly in my top 10 fave books. By the end, it seemed to me like a clear-cut canonical biggie (eg, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, 2666, Ulysses), but better natured than these -- also, it didn't seem like much of a chip was trying to be knocked off the authorial shoulder. Joyce took on Shakespeare, DFW tried to depose the postmodernist phallocracy, but Perec seems more at peace. It's like Beckett's sucking stones section in Molloy: elaborate, infinitely detailed processes
The first time I laid eyes on Georges Perec (not too dissimilar from his profile photo) many wild thoughts went through my head, a former child genius maybe, who had a nervous breakdown, ran away from home and was taken in by a religious cult that wore white robes and worshipped the moons of Jupiter, or a crazy scientist who spent far too much time in a dingy basement playing around with bunsen-burners and messing with chemical formulas, or how about a quite brilliant eccentric piano player who
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