La Vie mode d'emploi Reading Order

La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual, 1978) by Georges Perec is one of the most ambitious novels of the twentieth century and the most fully realised product of the Oulipo movement — the group of writers who used mathematical and formal constraints as generative devices. The novel describes, in exhaustive and digressive detail, the contents of a Parisian apartment building at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier at 8pm on a June evening in 1975: each chapter describes one room, each room opens into descriptions of its contents, its inhabitants, their histories, and their histories' histories, in an expanding structure that eventually encompasses not just the apartment building but vast swaths of European and world history, art history, puzzles, lists, and stories-within-stories. The presiding genius of the novel is Bartlebooth, an eccentric English millionaire who has devoted his life to a fifty-year project: spending ten years learning to paint watercolours, twenty years travelling the world painting a watercolour of each of 500 harbours, and twenty years reassembling the jigsaws that a craftsman named Winckler has made from each of the paintings, then destroying each completed jigsaw by chemically removing the paint — leaving only a blank puzzle-shaped sheet of paper, a life's work that cancels itself entirely. Bartlebooth dies at the halfway point of his reassembly project, still working, and the novel finds him with a Z-shaped piece in his hand for a hole that is X-shaped: a small imperfection in the great project of exhaustion. Perec constructed the novel using a 'clinamen' — a deliberate violation of the mathematical constraint that governed all the other decisions — the kind of creative error that makes the whole thing human rather than mechanical. La Vie mode d'emploi is one of the novels that most rewards and most defies description.