Book of a lifetime: Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec

From The Independent archive: David Bellos experiences the healing power of a deeply moving novel that brought French fiction back from the brink of extinction

Georges Perec was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker. ‘Life A User’s Manual’ was published when he was 42. He died three years later (Public domain)

Thirty years ago a colleague put a French paperback in my hand, saying “I couldn’t finish this. But you’ll probably like it”. I’d heard of the author; a recommendation from my cultivated head of department was not to be taken lightly; so I started reading the book that same evening in bed.

I was puzzled at first, as surely I was meant to be, because it begins with an essay on puzzles. When I woke in the morning the puzzle-plot was still in my mind: I think I had dreamt of nothing but Bartlebooth, Valene and Winckler.

Then I started sneezing: another Scottish winter cold was descending on me. As I had no classes that day, I went back to bed – and read on. Before the weekend was out, my cold was cured, and I knew that La Vie mode d’emploi was a masterpiece made for me.

I also knew what the puzzle was. As Georges Perec’s novel contains meticulous descriptions of all the objects in each of the rooms of a seven-storey block of flats in Paris (with the cellars and two attic floors making 10), it was surely a device permitting or more probably requiring the use of every word in the Grand Larousse dictionary.

Yet it was also a storybook as varied as anything by Dumas or Dickens. With ironic and mostly compressed tales of a disfigured cycling champion, a repentant lexicographer, an eccentric millionaire, an amateur chemist, a passionate diplomat, a disappointed archaeologist, a Russian soprano, an accidental home-improvement equipment tycoon, a second-rate watercolourist, a trader in cowrie shells, a mysterious puzzle-maker and a variety of con artists, it satisfied all cravings for narrative invention without every straying onto the over-trodden terrain of political or amorous soul-searching.

Far from detracting from the book’s interest, Perec’s reticence made his novel deeply moving. My colleague had been right. I loved it! I started reading it again. I soon realised I’d been wrong about the nature of the book’s formal puzzle (much more complicated than my initial surmise). It also dawned on me that it wasn’t really a French novel at all: it was a universal novel that just happened to be written in French. And that could easily be changed!

Here, at last, was a post-Sartre storybook capable of bringing French fiction back from the brink of extinction to which Alain Robbe-Grillet had driven it. I began to wonder if I could give Perec the global audience his novel seemed designed to reach.

With luck, the help of a dear friend, a courageous publisher and the most exhilarating hard work I have ever done, La Vie mode d’emploi became Life A User’s Manual within a few years. It changed my life. And it changed the field of the novel too.