LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL by Georges...

LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL by Georges Perec translated by David Bellos (David R. Godine: $14.95)

The chapters in this book describe the lives and contents within 11, Rue Simon-Crubellier, an apartment complex in Paris. Like a jigsaw puzzle, “the pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing. . . .”

Perec devotes as much care in itemizing a grocery list or the contents on a shelf in an apartment as he does in painting the motley inhabitants of the 32 dwellings. Among the characters is Percival Bartlebooth, who spends years learning to paint and subsequently has each of his seascapes made into jigsaw puzzles. After he has reassembled each puzzle, the paintings are removed from their backing and eradicated. “Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivator and unique activity of its author.”

“The seemingly random detail is philosophical,” Richard Eder wrote in these pages. “All we can say about reality is that it is everything. . . . It is like tracking partridge through the autumn woods. Every bit of red and gold dapple should be scanned, but lightly. . . Perec’s woods explode with life and it would be a pity to lose any.”