Life: A User’s Manual

Life: A User's Manual imagines a Paris apartment building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier with its facade removed, freezing one moment in June 1975 so every room and resident is laid bare. Perec tours the building room by room following a chess knight's move across a grid, telling the histories tied to each space. The central story follows Percival Bartlebooth, an Englishman who devised a lifelong project of learning watercolor, painting 500 seaports, having each turned into a jigsaw puzzle, reassembling them, then bleaching the restored paintings blank. Around him hundreds of other lives interlock through objects, coincidences, and shared history, all governed by an elaborate hidden system of mathematical constraints.