Life: A User’s Manual
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 @ 04:09
by Georges Perec (1978)
A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time the moment the protagonist (if he may be called so) Bartlebooth, dies. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints, resulting in an encyclopaedic work that is not just fascinating in its richness and masterful construction, but also beautiful, ordinary, bizarre, moving, and heart-wrenching.
Perec wrote on the preamble of this novel (which will be written again in the middle of the novel):
The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker undertakes to ask himself all the questions the player will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery and subterfuge.
Despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
Essentially, the book is an intricate piece of jigsaw puzzle, and indeed, structured so. The ten-storied apartment, 11, Rue Simon-Crubellieris, is laid out like a chessboard, with the stories of the inhabitants told per chapter in the order of knight’s move, as well as satisfying the complex “story-making” system Perec has created. These are but two of the self-imposed constraints in the novel. A mere literary gymnastic? Hardly. All the pieces of stories, while also can be independent on their own as parades of beguiling tales, combine together to form one grand layered labyrinth of the novel as a whole, tinged with subdued melancholy on the futility and pointlessness of life.
The principal story of the novel is the story of Percival Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman, who, upon realising he is interested in nothing and that his life is meaningless, resolves that “his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside of its completion”, that must have nothing to do with exploit or record, logical, and finally, useless with “circular perfection”:
For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting watercolours.
For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal, 65cm x 50cm) depicting seaports. When each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.
For twenty five years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once a gain, of one puzzle a fortnight. As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted — twenty years before — and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.
Things, of course, never go as planned, which other characters of the book too suffer from. Bartlebooth grows blind, an art critic with theoretical but colossal budget for hotel chains determined to acquire his works undestroyed, and Winckler dies two years earlier leaving pieces of puzzle deliberately made more and more difficult for Bartlebooth to finish, ending the novel with a sad (but “could have been foreseen”) irony and parallels.
Attentive readers will find ad verbum lines from Calvino, Melville (on top of the obvious Bartlebooth/Bartleby allusion, allusions to Melville are particularly plenty in Perec’s works), Bellmer, Stendhal, Marquez, Lowry, Nabokov, Joyce, etc. which Perec listed on the postscript, and those familiar with Perec’s La Disparition will bump into some similiarities. David Bellos did a fantastic translation job (particularly manifest in chapter 51). This is a beautiful book that one can return to again and again, dipped at any page; a fiction that comes with an index, chronology, and the layout of the apartment.
April 30th, 2007 12:18
[…] blind rat race that builds its own labyrinths, like Life: A User’s Manual (where traces of similar tongue-in-cheek diabolical plots, vengeances can also be found), the story […]
April 30th, 2007 13:15
[…] camp in the fictitious part. Readers familiar with his other more playful novels (such as Life: A User’s Manual and A Void) might notice a lack of general Oulipo constraints, but will still find Perec’s […]