Life: A User's Manual
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.
Around page 100 the abandonments start, before the interlocking design has paid back the effort it demands. The book “requires a level of concentration like a physics treatise,” one reader warns, which is a strange thing to ask of a novel. Nothing pulls you forward through the “fanatically described rooms,” and readers concede whole inventories can be skipped without loss: “I could see many people just skip whole chapters.” The cataloguing of obscure objects and professions strikes detractors as display rather than necessity, since “Perec is also a bit of a showoff regarding his vast knowledge.” The residents are almost uniformly comfortable and bourgeois. More than one reader finishes having “admired cerebellarly but didn’t appreciate narratively.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
