The Stay-In Weather Sale: 20% off select books
Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books
Cart |
|  my account  |  wish list  |  help   |  800-878-7323
Hello, | Login
MENU
  • Browse
    • New Arrivals
    • Bestsellers
    • Award Winners
    • Signed Preorders
    • Signed Editions
    • Digital Audio Books
    • See All Subjects
  • Used
  • Staff Picks
    • Staff Picks
    • Picks of the Month
    • Book Club Subscriptions
    • 25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books From the 21st Century
    • 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Women to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books to Read Before You Die
  • Gifts + Gift Cards
    • Gift Cards & eGift Cards
    • Powell's Souvenirs
    • Read Rise Resist Gear
    • Journals & Notebooks
    • Games
    • Socks
  • Sell Books
    • Sell Books Online
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Find A Store
McAfee Secure

  • The Stay-In Weather Sale
  • Kids' Graphic Novels Sale
  • Our 2021 TBR List
  • Books That Got Us Through 2020
  • Winter 20% Off Sale
  • Save 20% on OBOB Books

Visit Our Stores


Janice P. Nimura: Stand in the Place Where They Were (0 comment)
I’ve always loved historic house museums, loved peering beyond the velvet rope into a Victorian bedroom or a colonial kitchen and imagining the ghosts that wore those dresses, or worked the handle of that butter churn, or laid the fire in that grate... 

Read More»
  • Eden Dawn: Three Winter Dates to Do in Portland Right Now (0 comment)
  • Powell's Staff: All That's on Our 2021 TBR List (1 comment)

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##

Life A User's Manual

by Georges Perec, David Bellos
Life A User's Manual

  • Comment on this title
  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9781567923735
ISBN10: 1567923739



All Product Details

View Larger ImageView Larger Images
0.00
Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Cart
Add to Wishlist

From Powells.com

25 Books to Read Before You Die: World Edition

Travel the globe with these not-to-be-missed titles.


Staff Pick

Life: A User's Manual is the magnum opus of one of the most startlingly inventive and original novelists who ever lived. The French polymath Georges Perec, an associate of the Oulipo collective, once wrote a full-length novel without ever using the letter "e", then he wrote one in which "e" is the only vowel employed at all. In Life: A User's Manual, he deconstructs the lives in a fictional apartment block in Paris at one single moment in 1975. The result is a tapestry of interwoven stories that are alternately funny and sad and which originate from the most esoteric writing constraints imaginable. Arguably the totemic post-war French novel. Recommended By Jason C., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

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, 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, 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.

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.

Review

"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

Review

"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

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

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.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Be the first to share your thoughts on this title!




Product Details

ISBN:
9781567923735
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
07/01/2009
Publisher:
DAVID R GODINE PUBLISHER INC
Series info:
Verba Mundi (Paperback)
Pages:
661
Height:
1.50IN
Width:
5.50IN
Thickness:
1.50
Series:
Verba Mundi
Series Number:
18
Number of Units:
1
Illustration:
Yes
Copyright Year:
2009
Series Volume:
18
UPC Code:
2801567923737
Author:
Georges Perec
Translator:
David Bellos
Media Run Time:
B
Subject:
Metaphysics -- Fiction.
Subject:
Visionary & metaphysical

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
0.00
List Price:0.00
Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
Used Book Alert for book Receive an email when this ISBN is available used.
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram

  • Help
  • Guarantee
  • My Account
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Security
  • Wish List
  • Partners
  • Contact Us
  • Shipping
  • Sitemap
  • © 2021 POWELLS.COM Terms

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##