LU191 Café Littéraire: "Life: A User's Manual," by Georges Perec

Life: A User’s Manual is often described as an "encyclopedic" tapestry of human existence. Set within a single fictional apartment block at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, the novel is frozen in time at the exact moment of a resident’s death: June 23, 1975, at 8:00 PM. From this static instant, Perec meticulously "dissects" the building, moving chapter by chapter through its rooms to reveal the interconnected lives, histories, and secrets of its inhabitants.

The narrative is famously governed by an intricate set of mathematical and formal constraints—a hallmark of Perec’s work with the Oulipo group. The order of the 99 chapters follows a "knight’s tour" across a 10x10 grid of the building’s layout, ensuring the reader visits every room without ever repeating a path. At the heart of these nested stories is the eccentric Englishman Percival Bartlebooth, who devises a 50-year plan to travel the world, paint 500 watercolors of seaports, have them turned into jigsaw puzzles, and ultimately destroy them so that no trace of his life’s work remains.

Both a playful puzzle and a mournful meditation on the "unquenchable thereness" of objects, Life: A User’s Manual transforms a mundane apartment block into a microcosm of the world. A strong discussion angle for the group is Perec’s use of exhaustive detail—inventories of furniture, lists of books, and descriptions of paintings—and whether these rigid structures succeed in capturing the "totality" of life or merely underscore its ultimate incompleteness.

Winner of the 1978 Prix Médicis.

The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the June meeting opens on Saturday, 16 May.