La Vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual)

"Yes, I did it more than 20 years ago. This is a 20th-century novel which, in its own special way, is as ambitious and as capacious as Les Misérables or the other great encyclopaedic 19th-century fictions. And that’s why it’s unusual, coming out in Paris in the 1970s. It’s not the kind of novel that was made necessary by contemporary ideas of what fiction should be. It really is its own thing – a very special thing. What it is is a completely stationary novel, which seems a contradiction in terms; the entire novel happens in the blink of an eye, just before eight o’clock on 23 June 1975. Each chapter, of which there are 99, describes one room in a block of flats in a particular place in Paris, a fictional place but the surrounds of it are not fictional at all, and so each chapter is the description of a room. And, as he describes the room, he describes the objects in the room, and the objects are attached to narratives about how they came to be there, and so, little by little, in this sort of pointilliste way, the stories build up, because some of the people are connected and some aren’t, and over these 99 chapters you get a sense of the multiplicity of lives, and of an over-arching story – that of a millionaire called Bartlebooth who is so rich he doesn’t know what to do with his life. So he adopts a plan that will keep him busy and harmless for the next 50 years. “A huge undertow of 20th-century literature is attempting to rewrite Les Misérables .” For ten years he learns to paint watercolours from a painter who lives in one of the flats and then for 20 years he tours the world, painting one watercolour per fortnight which he sends back to Paris where it’s mounted on a piece of ash board and cut into a cunning jigsaw puzzle by another resident of the flats. At the end of the 20 years Bartlebooth gets back to Paris, having very conveniently missed the Second World War, and settles down to solve his jigsaw puzzles – one a fortnight for 20 years, which will bring him to 1975. But the plan involves a very special process whereby, once he has reassembled the puzzle – a watercolour of a port scene that he vaguely remembers from 20 years before – it can be glued together again and sent back to where it was originally painted. There it is dipped in a detergent solution and returned to being just a sheet of paper. So it all goes round and round in complete perfect circles. No. There are hundreds of other stories slotted in like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some people love it for its cleverness but, behind the cleverness, there is something more, something not as simple as a psychology or a character, but something deeply human, deeply reflective of the human condition. Perec didn’t believe you could really get to know a person better than by looking at the details – what they put on their mantelpiece… He wasn’t at all keen on what Balzac and Hugo do which is to tell you what’s going on inside somebody’s head – he thought you could never know what’s going on inside somebody’s head, but you could deduce it from what they do outside."