Life: A User's Manual

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Though Perec (1936-1982) is ``experimental'' in the tradition of Joyce and Nabokovhis work is rich with word games and acrostics that reveal the secret life of languagethis euphoric novel, winner of the Prix Medicis, will enchant a range of readers. The serial storytelling within the framework narrative is as beguiling and inexhaustible as Scheherazade's. The facade is removed from a Parisian apartment house on the Rue Simon-Crubellier, permitting us to spy on its tenants in the grid of rooms and to examine their pictures and bibelots. Books, letters, clippings and announcements add to the textual welter, all interlocking like pieces of a puzzle, the novel's chief metaphor. Tales told in stylishly reinvented genresromance, detection, adventureconstitute what is experienced, read about or dreamed up by an array of restaurateurs, mediums, cyclists, antique dealers and pious widows. A quester for the Nile tries to rescue a beautiful German girl from a harem. A judge's wife, whose sexually thrilling thefts result in a sentence of hard labor, ends as a bag lady on a park bench. Meanwhile a team of eccentric artists, Bartlebooth, Winckler and Valene, enact the creative process, painting watercolor seascapes, cutting them apart with a jigsaw and reassembling them as smoothly as ``an oily sea closing over a drowning man.'' The image of a splendidly wrought table, its interior fretted by patient worms, succinctly and differently restates the process. This is a classic of contemporary fiction. (November 5)

Library Journal

``The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work,'' begins Perec's encyclopedic novel, which details everything, animate and inamimate, in an imaginary apartment house. His characters unfailingly do the least expected: Laurelle, killed at her own wedding by a falling chandelier; Ingeborn, who casts a white actor as Otello; Gregoire, fired from a vegetarian restaurant for pouring beef extract in the vegetable soup; a judge's wife sentenced to hard labor. The author reserves the greatest irony for Percival Bartlebooth, like himself an artist. Bartlebooth paints watercolors that are made into jigsaw puzzles, then reverses the process until he has a perfectly blank sheet. Creation and dissolution are the themes in this highly entertaining work, itself a puzzle. Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City, Iowa

Paul Auster

"Those who have a taste for the unusual, for books that creates world unto themselves, would be dazzled by this crazy - quilt monument to the imagination." -- The New York Times Book Review

Richard Eder

"Perec's artistry has achieved a perfect balance between allure and inponderability...it is like tracking patridge through the autumn woods. Every bit of red and gold dabble should be scanned...Perec's words explodes with life and it would be a pit to lose any." -- The Los Angeles Times