An entire Paris apartment building, described room by room. Perec constructed the 1978 novel according to an elaborate chess-knight's-tour constraint, and the result is a labyrinthine portrait of 20th-century life in all its obsessions, collections, stories, and failures. The OuLiPo movement's greatest achievement. Le Monde ranked it forty-third.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.