📚 Book of the Day (#fiction #experimental)
📖 "Life: A User's Manual" 📖
by Georges Perec
🧩 A Captivating Mosaic of Stories and Puzzles
📘 About:
"Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec, first published in 1978, is considered a landmark in experimental literature. Known for his playful and complex use of language and structure, Perec crafts a narrative that is a metaphorical puzzle as much as it is a literary piece.
The novel unfolds in a Parisian apartment block at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Rather than follow a conventional plot, the book takes the readers through 99 different rooms of the building, exploring the lives and stories of its inhabitants. Each chapter is like a stand-alone story, yet all are interconnected through a web of intricate details, objects, and a back history that binds these characters together.
Central to the narrative is Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman whose life project is to spend 50 years completing 500 watercolor paintings, have them made into puzzles and then reassembled before being dipped in a solution to erase them entirely—a quest for meaning through art, only to embrace its erasure, underlying Perec’s theme of the absurdity and ephemeral nature of human endeavor.
"Life: A User's Manual" delves into themes of time, memory, loss, and the mundane, packed with lists, technical descriptions, and digressions that challenge the traditional narrative flow. The novel’s structure is inspired by a knight’s tour of a chessboard, where each chapter is like a move of the knight, meticulously planned yet seemingly arbitrary.
👍 - I've read it
❤️ - I wanna read it
📖 "Life: A User's Manual" 📖
by Georges Perec
🧩 A Captivating Mosaic of Stories and Puzzles
📘 About:
"Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec, first published in 1978, is considered a landmark in experimental literature. Known for his playful and complex use of language and structure, Perec crafts a narrative that is a metaphorical puzzle as much as it is a literary piece.
The novel unfolds in a Parisian apartment block at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Rather than follow a conventional plot, the book takes the readers through 99 different rooms of the building, exploring the lives and stories of its inhabitants. Each chapter is like a stand-alone story, yet all are interconnected through a web of intricate details, objects, and a back history that binds these characters together.
Central to the narrative is Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman whose life project is to spend 50 years completing 500 watercolor paintings, have them made into puzzles and then reassembled before being dipped in a solution to erase them entirely—a quest for meaning through art, only to embrace its erasure, underlying Perec’s theme of the absurdity and ephemeral nature of human endeavor.
"Life: A User's Manual" delves into themes of time, memory, loss, and the mundane, packed with lists, technical descriptions, and digressions that challenge the traditional narrative flow. The novel’s structure is inspired by a knight’s tour of a chessboard, where each chapter is like a move of the knight, meticulously planned yet seemingly arbitrary.
👍 - I've read it
❤️ - I wanna read it