Summary of Life: A User’s Manual
Life: A User’s Manual is an experimental novel composed of various stories about the inhabitants of a Haussmann-style apartment block in Paris. The building is presented as though its façade had been removed, revealing its rooms and occupants at a single moment in time. Moving from room to room, the novel explores the residents’ lives and relationships. Its main storyline is the fifty-year project of Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman who lives in the building: after spending years learning to paint watercolours, he travels around the world, producing 500 paintings of different seaports; the paintings are turned into jigsaw puzzles, which he then tries to complete before having their colours dissolved, leaving only blank sheets of paper.
Reasons to read Life: A User’s Manual
Life: A User’s Manual is generally regarded as the masterpiece of French writer Georges Perec. It won the Prix Médicis in 1978 and was included in Le Monde’s list of the 100 Books of the Century in 1999. The highly experimental novel consists of 99 chapters, most of which describe a different room in the building and recount stories about its present or former occupants. Perec moves through the building following a complex pattern based on the moves of a knight on a chessboard. Structured like a puzzle, the book attempts to capture a fragment of the world and the wide variety of human lives, ambitions and experiences. Other works by Perec include A Void (La Disparition), a novel written without using the letter ‘e’, and The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex (Les Revenentes), in which ‘e’ is the only vowel used.
Setting: Paris (France)
Life: A User’s Manual is set in a fictitious apartment block at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, itself a fictional street, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris (within the quadrilateral formed by Rue Médéric, Rue Jadin, Rue de Chazelles and Rue Léon Jost). Discover more books set in Paris.
Original title: La vie mode d’emploi
Year of publication: 1978
Nr of pages: 680
