Life: A User's Manual
Georges Perec · 1978
An entire Paris apartment building, described room by room. Perec constructed the 1978 novel according to an elaborate chess-knight's-tour constraint, and the result is a labyrinthine portrait of 20th-century life in all its obsessions, collections, stories, and failures. The OuLiPo movement's greatest achievement. Le Monde ranked it forty-third.
The case against
Perec catalogs. Rooms, paintings, tools, recipes, the contents of cellars: lists run for pages, and the hundred-odd embedded stories get a few paragraphs each before the knight's move drags you to the next apartment. Admiring the machine is easy. Caring about anyone inside it takes a discipline the book never quite repays.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
