Life: A User's Manual

Name: Life: A User's Manual
Author: Georges Perec

Georges Perec · 1978

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 against

on the translation
“that the book has been translated and edited extremely carelessly”
Gabriel Josipovici · Times Literary Supplement, 1987
on the room descriptions
“a set of fanatically described rooms and a variety of nested or truncated stories”
Geoff Wisner · Words Without Borders, 2010
on the bourgeois characters
“they largely revolved around either the impossibly wealthy or involved otherwise thoroughly bourgeois characters”
a book blog
on the opening
“The sheer volume of detail can, particularly at the beginning of the novel, be overwhelming”
a book blog