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Life, a user's manual

Title
Life, a user's manual / Georges Perec ; translated from the French by David Bellos.
Author
Perec, Georges, 1936-1982
Publication
  • Boston : David R. Godine, [2013]
  • ©2009

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextRequest in advance JFD 10-563Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Additional Authors
Bellos, David.
Description
xviii, 661 p. : ill.; 22 cm.
Summary
"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, and 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 in 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 formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel."--BOOK JACKET.
Series Statement
A Verba Mundi book
Uniform Title
  • Vie mode d'emploi. English
  • Verba Mundi ; 18.
Alternative Title
Vie mode d'emploi.
Subjects
Genre/Form
Fiction.
Note
  • "Originally published in French in 1978 as La Vie mode d'emploi by Editions Hachette Littérature, Paris"--T.p. verso.
  • Includes index.
Call Number
JFD 10-563
ISBN
  • 9781567923735 (paperback)
  • 1567923739 (paperback)
OCLC
883402864
Author
Perec, Georges, 1936-1982, author.
Title
Life, a user's manual / Georges Perec ; translated from the French by David Bellos.
Publisher
Boston : David R. Godine, [2013]
Copyright Date
©2009
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Series
A Verba Mundi book
Verba Mundi ; 18.
Added Author
Bellos, David.
Research Call Number
JFD 10-563
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