Book description
In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris
apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the
building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his
picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known
there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building
revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every
more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an
eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...
Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first
novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his
unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of
writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed
acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions
of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes,
plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long,
travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's
Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978
after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put
beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's
international reputation.
