Life : A User's Manual

Perec, George

ISBN 10: 0002719991 / ISBN 13: 9780002719995

Published by Collins Harvill, 1992

About this Item

Moderate creasing to cover. Spine is tight; pgs are unmarked. "One of the great novels of the century." -- The Times Literary Supplement.

Seller Inventory # 019816

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Life : A User's Manual
• Publisher: Collins Harvill
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0002719991
• ISBN 13: 9780002719995
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good Minus
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction for Grownups and Older Kids

About this title

Synopsis

In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...

About the Author

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.