Godine is proud to have published the first English translation of Georges Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as “one of the great novels of the century.” We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User’s Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future.
- May 30, 2013 inspiration. A decade before he released Life: a User’s Manual, Perec published A Void, a maddening and richly creative mystery novel written without the letter 'e' (except for the novelist's name). Three years later, Perec published a novella, Les revenentes, in which 'e' is the only vowel found in the work.
- Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as.
Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante’s Commedia and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce’s Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time — 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 — Perec’s spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual 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.
Life A User's Manual is a book for readers, and the more you have read the more you will appreciate the subtle references to other novels and popular culture. But to say so would do injustice to a book that is quite simply a marvel to read.
But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. 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, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.
Praise for Life A User’s Manual: Revised Edition
I am sure I will be piecing my way through Perec’s monumental storytelling puzzle — an anatomy of a single moment in time (8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975) in a Parisian apartment building — for the next several weeks. With pleasure.
—James Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review
One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.
—Boston Globe
Picador
I once had the occasion to write to the translator of these books, David Bellos, and I took the opportunity to let him know that Perec is my favorite writer, and that, since a translator is to a large extent the creative force behind a translated work, he, David Bellos, is also, in a palpable way, my favorite writer. Few writers have opened up the possibilities of literary art with as much enthusiasm, mastery, and pleasure as Perec.
—Martin Riker, Associate Director of the Dalkey Archive Press
In this wondrously optimistic book, he sidles through the lives of the inhabitants of a single Paris apartment block and manages to convey scintillas of every aspect of the human condition—proving that, while ultimately without point, life is a continuum rich beyond belief, and so very well worth living.
—The Week Magazine
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
This elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel has drawn comparisons to the masterworks of twentieth-century literature.
—Rolling Stone
Life A User's Manual Summary 1
A classic of contemporary fiction.
—Publishers Weekly
Perec’s artistry has achieved a perfect balance between allure and imponderability.
—The Los Angeles Times
Life is one of the best books to come out of the Oulipo—a French literary movement in which writers use explicit constraints to create their texts—and is about, well, life.
—Chad W. Post, director, Open Letter Books
Life A User's Manual Summary Template
Absolutely indispensable[…] a postmodern work that you shouldn’t miss out on.
—The Huffington Post
Soupy Sales
This title is now available as an eBook through Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and other eBook retailers.