Life, A User's Manual

So after I came up with my final project idea, I ran across David Bellos' translation of a book by Georges Perec, a Frenchman, called Life, A User's Manual. The idea behind the book somewhat resembles the idea behind my hypertextual neighborhood-- although Perec's idea was considerably more original, considering that his book was published in 1978. Perec examines every room in an apartment block in Paris on the evening of June 23, 1975

There are several interesting aspects to this book. For instance, despite its avant-garde structure, Life, A User's Manual was both a popular and a critical success-- almost a French version of House of Leaves.

It is possible to read the book front to back like you would a conventional novel, although my experience has been that it's just as satisfying to flip through at random. And Perec provides other ways of reading and organizing his massive (nearly 600-page) book than the merely chronological: there's a chronology and a list of some of the stories organized alphabetically ("The Tale of the Eccentric American Lady," "The Tale of the Man who bought the Vase of the Passion," etc.) In this sense, Perec's book resembles a vaster, modern Canterbury Tales. (Oh, remediation...) But it also resembles, say, Deena Larsen's Disappearing Rain, which gives the reader a choice between several different ways of organizing his reading experience.

Another thing: the inside jacket flap talks about how the book "will be recognized as a milestone of the postwar European experience." To me, the book doesn't read like a particularly French or European experience-- although I suppose it is fairly Western. Maybe fragmented, non-traditional narratives are not necessarily a product of technology, or the internet, or war-- but a product of every society that has experienced any (or all) of these norm-shaking events.