Book 0175
Life ( A Users Manual) by Georges Perec
Donated by Toby Jones, who says...
Here is the story of a Parisian apartment block: its ghosts, its inhabitants and the objects and spaces that surround them. Perec loved games and as you explore the various addresses you feel as if the book is in turn discovering you, tickling and disconcerting the reader. It is a jigsaw puzzle teeming with the abundance and trash of lives lived passionately and pointlessly. Funny, touching and inscrutable…
I have a copy of this book on my shelf – one of the few books that you can open at any page and get an enclosed caption that hints at an inscrutable, divided but consistent whole. Whether each entry is a short description of a room or a pages-long narrative, interspersed with comment and description, the whole novel is infused with Perec’s infectious joy in the written word.