Life: A User's Manual

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eBay item number:236351430665
Last updated on Sep 30, 2025 01:31:23 SGTView all revisionsView all revisions

Item specifics

Condition
Very Good: A book that has been read but is in excellent condition. No obvious damage to the cover, ...
Release Year
2009
ISBN
9781567923735
Category

About this product

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Godine Publisher, David R.
ISBN-10
1567923739
ISBN-13
9781567923735
eBay Product ID (ePID)
69548702

Product Key Features

Book Title
Life a User's Manual
Number of Pages
661 Pages
Language
English
Publication Year
2009
Topic
Visionary & Metaphysical, General, Absurdist, Literary
Genre
Fiction
Author
Georges Perec
Format
Trade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height
1.5 in
Item Weight
27.9 Oz
Item Length
8.4 in
Item Width
5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended Audience
Trade
Reviews
Praise for Life A User's Manual "Those who have a taste for the unusual, for books that create worlds unto themselves, will be dazzled by this crazy-quilt monument to the imagination."-- The New York Times Book Review "In this wondrously optimistic book, he sidles through the lives of the inhabitants of a single Paris apartment block and manages to convey scintillas of every aspect of the human condition--proving that, while ultimately without point, life is a continuum rich beyond belief, and so very well worth living."-- The Week Magazine "This elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel has drawn comparisons to the masterworks of twentieth-century literature."-- Rolling Stone "A classic of contemporary fiction."-- Publishers Weekly "Absolutely indispensable...a postmodern work that you shouldn't miss out on."-- The Huffington Post
Dewey Edition
21
Dewey Decimal
843.9/14
Synopsis
"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."-- Boston Globe 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, an 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 A User's Manual 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 is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; 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 formula. All are there for the reader to solve., Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as "one of the great novels of the century." We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User's Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future. 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, an 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 is 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 formula. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

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