Jigsaws Life: a User's Manual

By Paul Gray

Outside his native France, Novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) was known chiefly as a member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes. And four years before he died of cancer, Perec published La Vie Mode d'Emploi, a novel that French critics have increasingly hailed as a masterpiece.

Some skepticism may be permissible. The Gallic taste for abstractions and literary fun and games is not universally shared. And wordplay, no matter how winsome, does not travel well from one language to another. In any case, English-speaking readers can now examine Perec's most acclaimed book for themselves. At first glance, Life: A User's Manual looks every bit as good as the French have been saying it is for years.

This despite a number of intentional difficulties that ought to make the work unreadable. The setting is a capacious apartment house in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris. Each of Perec's 99 chapters takes place in a different room or locale in the building. Scrupulous attention is paid to the furnishings, wallpaper, paintings, knickknacks and impedimenta in each new scene. The time is shortly before 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. That is when the action begins and when it ends. In other words, this book has no forward movement, no fundamental plot at all.

What it possesses instead is the slow, hypnotic fascination of an enormous puzzle being assembled piece by piece. Perec makes his jigsaw methods quite explicit. One of the residents in the apartment house is a wealthy Englishman named Percival Bartlebooth, whose past, along with those of dozens of other tenants, gradually emerges. In 1925, Bartlebooth embarks on the rigid program he has mapped out for the rest of his life. He spends ten years learning how to paint watercolors. For the next 20 years he travels the globe, rendering one seaport scene roughly every two weeks and sending each painting to Paris, where a craftsman turns the artwork into a jigsaw puzzle. From 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, back in his apartment, solves each puzzle and then has the reassembled watercolor shipped to its place of origin, where it is erased. The beauty of Bartlebooth's life's work is its rigorous uselessness: "starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, Bartlebooth would end up with nothing."

Given the fascinating eccentricities that crop up on nearly every page of this novel, Bartlebooth's plan seems almost humdrum. From the most straitened (and self-imposed) circumstances, Perec spins forth an infinite variety of entertainments, hundreds of tales, anecdotes, puzzles, mysteries, conundrums and diversions. Do the glittering pieces add up to a radiant whole? While the fun proceeds, this question seems irrelevant. At the end, it teases and haunts.