Life: A User's Manual - Softcover

Georges Perec

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567923739 ISBN 13: 9781567923735

Publisher: Verba Mundi, 2009

Synopsis

Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, The 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. Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and as inspiring in its break with tradition 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 extraordinarily 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. 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. Translated from French by David Bellos. A Verba Mundi book from David R. Godine.

About this title

About the Author

Georges Perec (March 7, 1936 in Paris-March 3, 1982 in Ivry-sur-Seine) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Edition details

• Publisher: Verba Mundi
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1567923739
• ISBN 13: 9781567923735
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 661