≡ Download Life A User Manual English and French Edition Georges Perec David Bellos Books

Life A User Manual English and French Edition Georges Perec David Bellos Books

Download As PDF : Life A User Manual English and French Edition Georges Perec David Bellos Books

Life A User Manual English and French Edition Georges Perec David Bellos Books

This is a very complex book.I'l need to read it again some day in the future because I'm not sure I got the whole multitude of stories events persons and dark meanings of the book but one thing I can say now :this book has all the sadness,all the pain but also the joy of life itself. Reading it I've learned a lot about the world, the history of humankind,the meaning of words and plays and also about myself


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Life A User Manual English and French Edition Georges Perec David Bellos Books Reviews

Loved it. Slightly quirky, but very enjoyable.
Don't expect to finish this book in a few days. It's dense reading, but entertaining.
It reminds me of Nabokov; Perec plays word games while he tells his overlapping
and intertwined stories.
I feel like a lot of people posting about this book are clearly extreme lit nerds. I read this book as a high school student and still thought it was breathtaking. For me, I didn't really understand that there was any underlying literary theory behind it - what I liked about it was that, like Moby-Dick, it seems like several times it starts meandering and turning in on itself and you begin to question its relevance and quality, and then in the last few pages it comes together and hits you in the face with exactly how much it means. There's so much there to understand and uncover.

If I gave any advice to someone reading this book for the first time, it's to stick it out. It started to get pretty exasperating for me - so long, so many details - but ultimately it's the immersion in a foreign, detailed, and physically constrained environment that allows the book to pack such a wallop. The ending is worth waiting for.
Almost perfect structurally, this book is a puzzle to be solved. The interwoven stories of the people in a Parisian apartment complex are compelling in themselves, but the way the stories are pulled together, and the overriding form of the book is masterful. A delightful, if quite difficult, read. At times, the lengthy lists in the book can get a bit tedious, but this didn't decrease my enjoyment of the book as a whole.
I own an earlier translation (into English). This says "English and French edition", but the French original is not included. I am very disappointed, and feel it is mislabeled.
I ordered this novel from by virtue of its near unanimous five star review status. After having read the work in its entirety, I must admit to being somewhat mystified by the accolades showered upon it. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it or find it unreadable, but neither would I include it on my list of 500 greatest books either.

The book consists of many very short chapters, each such chapter taking as its theme a room or location in an apartment building in Paris. Each chapter begins with a detailed description of the furniture, the wall coverings, the floor coverings, fabrics, knick-knacks, curios, paintings, inhabitants, what they are wearing and what they had for lunch. These descriptions sometimes extend for pages at a time. One involved the entire contents of a pantry, describing each can of food, its color, cover design and contents. Really?

Periodically, after "setting the stage", a fascinating story ensues. Sometimes it doesn't. Over the course of the novel, many of the key players are reintroduced, but it may be difficult to remember a minor character introduced 75 pages ago in a four page chapter. One reviewer confessed to keeping a notebook in order to remember the characters. I didn't keep a notebook, hence my failure to maintain any continuity with some of the inhabitants of the building.

There are many fine and well told tales contained in this novel, however, the sometimes mind numbing level of descriptive detail, which make up a significant portion of the book, dilutes the effect of the tales, both with respect to the word count as well as the impact of the prose.

If forced to read every word of this novel, I would likely have ditched it mid-way through. However, the paragraphs of seemingly never ending picayune descriptions are easily identified and usually occur at the beginning of each chapter. When confronted with three paragraphs of detailed descriptions of every carving contained in a curio case, I simply scanned forward to the conclusion of the exercise and was often rewarded with captivating reading for the remainder of the chapter. Again, sometimes not.

I feel the need to point out that I am not by nature a contrarian. I don't seek out universally well beloved works and trash them as a matter of course. However, I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what it is about this collection of minutia that has garnered such near unanimous accolades.
I just finished "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" and as I got deeper into that book, it kept reminding me of Life A User's Manual" which I first read in 1989.

My first reading of the book was hard going. I felt like I was reading dry descriptions, one after another, that had no relation to what came before or after. I almost gave up, but something kept me going and I'm glad I persevered. A few years later, I read the book again and got more out of it. At that time, I was working for a physician who had a Ph.D. in mathematical linguistics. On a whim, I gave it him a copy for Christmas. He was tickled with the book and asked me if I knew that the author was a mathematician. I didn't, but it made sense.

It is now 2011 and I have probably re-read this book 14 times since 1989. It is such a beautifully constructed puzzle that I would like nothing more than to be able to assemble each chapter in miniature and then fit all the pieces together.

This review probably makes little sense; I do not have the ability to convey the charm and cunning genius of the writing and construction. Just buy it, read it, and re-read it.

You'll see what I'm trying to say.
This is a very complex book.I'l need to read it again some day in the future because I'm not sure I got the whole multitude of stories events persons and dark meanings of the book but one thing I can say now this book has all the sadness,all the pain but also the joy of life itself. Reading it I've learned a lot about the world, the history of humankind,the meaning of words and plays and also about myself