Life: A User’s Manual
It's a while since I have discussed a book on here, and that's because I have been revelling in slowly reading a work perfect for these pages. Life: A User's Manual is a translation from the French novel by Georges Perec, which details the lives of the myriad residents of a Parisian apartment block. Striking and joyous, is how much of these lives is told through the objects that surround them.
At the centre of the novel is Percival Bartlebooth, an eccentric millionaire engaged in the ultimate act of prolonged iconoclasm. His entire adult life has been dedicated to the production of 500 watercolours of seaviews, which he has travelled to paint in situ. These have then been transformed into intricate puzzles, which he has painstakingly put together to then be shipped back to their place of origin to and destroyed. Only a blank, white sheet of paper is left at the end of this elaborate process. Over the course of the novel it emerges that most of the apartment block's inhabitants are, or have been, involved in this process, from the dedicated manservant planning Bartlebooth's travel itinerary, to the artist who taught him to paint, the woodworking genius who cut the puzzles, and the efficient lady who made the boxes to house them, to the struggling producer who sought to make a film out of Bartlebooth's life.
Around this core of intensely material activity towards an empty product, the novel abounds with things. Each apartment's contents are lovingly described. In one, we learn of the complex historical narratives depicted in the paintings on a living room wall, in another of the contents of a letter lying on a table. A past resident's history is told through a photograph found abandoned on the stairs, and the entire psychological baggage of a family is shown through the contents of their cellar: endless tins, jars and bottles massed for a potential nuclear attack. In the attic lives a famous artist who paints 'portraits' using only objects and people loosely emblematic of the sitter. One family run an antique shop from the ground floor, where objects move in a complex dance between house, cellar and shop. Each chapter tells the story of a different apartment and the narrative moves from one to another in the path of the knight in a game of chess.
More than this, many objects appear in the pages themselves. Flyers, business cards, menus, crosswords, polite signs and dictionary entries are reproduced exactly on the page, as are the outlines of the complicated puzzle pieces that haunt Bartlebooth's dreams. The novel ends as he dies, one piece left missing in his current puzzle. As the novel has led you to expect, the gaping space is an X while the piece in his hand is a W. Days later, Valène his painting teacher dies too, leaving a roughly sketched canvas on which is shown each apartment in the block filled with its inhabitants and their lives; on the facing page a plan of the block for the reader to use as reference in this complicated story. With most of the other residents away for the summer, and the flats waiting quietly in the summer heat, Perec, Bartlebooth and Valène leave you with the feeling, despite the book's instructive title, that it's not life that matters, it's what you live it with that counts.