Life: A User's Manual (Verba Mundi International Literature Series)

By: Georges Perec

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Synopsis: The renowned French author&’s modern masterpiece: &“one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov&” (Boston Globe). Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec&’s &“elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel&” begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny—and sometimes quite ordinary (Rolling Stone). From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life: A User&’s Manual is a symphony of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. The apartment block&’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, and problems of chess and logic. All are there for the reader to solve.&“Those who have a taste for the unusual, for books that create worlds unto themselves, will be dazzled by this crazy-quilt monument to the imagination.&” —The New York Times Book Review

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