Spring 2011 Big Read: Life A User’s Manual By Georges Perec

96 Percent Stupid
Dalkey is getting some great coverage for their Gaddis re-releases. The New Yorker picks out a gem anecdote: William... »
Yet Another One-Sentence Book
Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius. Reviewed. Portrait of the Mother as a Young... »
DFW 50th Birthday Notes
Yesterday would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday. Some interesting resources from around the web: Who Was... »
Review of Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery
At The National, my review of Proud Beggars, the latest in the miniature explosion of the resurrect-Albert-Cossery... »
The Next Generation of Cultural Criticism
Another nice article on Zero books, this one in The Guardian. It's well worth checking out. Yet talk to smaller radical... »
On Those Pleasures Particular to Printed Books
I'm not sure anyone who has tried to read Comic Sans would agree with this: Literature is made up of words. They can be... »
Varamo by Cesar Aira Publishing Next Week
The latest translation of Cesar Aira—Varamo—is publishing next week. (Too bad they didn't pub it this week, then everyone... »
Review of Anti-Matter
Yesterday my review of Ben Jeffrey's Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism ran at Bookforum. It's a great read... »
Deafness to the First-Person
John Jeremiah Sullivan at the LARoB discussing Pulphead. Jonathan Franzen and several other authors made a list of the ten... »
The Value of a Good Writer-Editor Relationship
Right here. This diffidence never left him: when he was preparing his last book for the press, Leibowitz writes,... »

In Red by Magdalena Tulli December 5, 2011
In Red is Tulli's most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot "movement," and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might fi […]
Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski December 5, 2011
Early in Show Up, Look Good, Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, newly single Michelle meets up with an old friend, Barb, from the Midwest. Michelle has already been portrayed as a woman who attracts all variations of awkwardness and bad luck: she’s awakened to find her ex, Thom, “having his way, well, with a marital aid,” agreed to bathe an old woman as part of […]
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori December 5, 2011
Gregor von Rezzori’s fictitious city Czernopol exists at the edge of civilization, on the border of memory and invention, lying “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe.” In reality it is Czernowitz, in the region known as the Bukovina, ceded by the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775, then after World War I part of Romania […]
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami December 4, 2011
The publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s biggest, most ambitious novel to date, seems to have brought his career full-circle. This is not simply because the book has widely been posited as Murakami’s Brothers Karamazov—that is, an attempt to write a meganovel summing up his life’s writing—but even more because of the trajectory Murakami has taken as a writ […]
Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen December 4, 2011
Ordinary Sun at times feels like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top. Make no mistake though: there is no otherworld. Henriksen’s world is this world. Who doesn’t recognize her own kind in lines like these, from “Corolla in the Midden”: “I do not dream. I just watch / f […]
Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski December 4, 2011
Though sometimes referred to as a Modernist, Kaplinski’s poetry often has the feel of a classical, and older, poetics. The poems have a gravitas; they do not mock, toy, or play with the reader. They invite the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts, remembrances, and philosophy of a person as they flicker and flow. This contemplative, philosophic strain is pres […]
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff December 4, 2011
A martyr is not necessarily a saint, in any case, and those who knew him didn’t turn to him for saintliness. He was spellbinding, an electrical jolt for the psyche. An encounter with him, as a colleague or as a mentor, could be life-changing and endlessly rewarding. Warts and all, the real man carries far more interest than the photoshopped one Loseff gives […]
From Fiona and Ferdinand by Josef Haslinger December 4, 2011
On the day of Bachmaier’s funeral there were two messages from my mother waiting for me on the answering machine. In the first one she asked me to call her back, in the second she said that the village was in an uproar: I was to come at once. Calls from my mother were rare. […]
Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom and Max Neumann December 4, 2011
As hard as you look at it, Max Neumann’s paintings don’t reveal much about his method, but two recent English-language publications imply that he must enjoy collaborating with luminaries of world literature. AnimalInside, reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation's issue 25 by Christiane Craig, brought Neumann together with László Krasznahorkai, the presti […]
Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares December 4, 2011
Someone once noted that it’s easy to have virtue when facing adversity but the real test of character comes when one is given power. To test this aphorism, one need look no further than Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique for evidence of how power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. Tavares is a prolific writer from Portugal who […]

Life Big Read: Reckoning With Perec

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading everyone’s responses to Life A User’s Manual, and if you haven’t done so yet I urge you to register your opinion, regardless of it you read it during the Big Read or at some other point in the past. I’d like to talk about one point that’s come up a number of times in a number of ways–people are largely dividing the book into “stories” and “descriptions,” which is a fair enough way to roughly group the material in Life. I think that virtually everyone likes the stories, and with good reason . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The End

Per the schedule, we should all be done with Life A User’s Manual this week. How many of you made it to the end, how many of you didn’t, and why did you or didn’t you? I’m curious to know specifically why this book did or did not work for you, because it seems to divide reader-friends of mine like few others . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 5

So here’s a couple of things for you to ponder. Number one, now that we’ve gotten through most of the book, I want to return to one of the very first questions we brought up–do the constraints matter to you or not? . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The Big Middle

So I think this week in the Life Big Read is the part in which we all take a deep breath and plod through this book’s long middle. The excitement of beginning, along with the momentum of discovering Bartlebooth’s big plan, has peetered out, yet we are not quite into the homestretch yet. Rather we are in the middle, a bit of a muddy trench filled with story after story, description after description, list after list. This, for me, is the slowest part of Life A User’s Manual, and yet, there is much here to thrill. I’ll first direct everyone’s attention to . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 4

From the Operation Paperclip Wikipedia page

This week concurrently with Life A User’s Manual I’ve been reading Beckett’s trilogy starting with Molloy, and I noticed this interesting coincidence of thoughts. They deal with satisfaction, meaning, and hope, items that are certainly of central importance to Perec’s book. My emphasis in both quotes. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: Words as Things

For various reasons, during this week’s reading I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between things and words. Part of this, I’m convinced, is my concurrent reading of the recent book The Information by James Gleick, which is all about the history of language as a medium of information communication and storage. But I also think that my thoughts about things vis a vis words (and vice versa) has to do with this week’s subject-matter. There just seems to be a lot about objects that are heavily reliant on words for their substance, or words that are objects in and of themselves. As to the latter, I think the best example we have is Cinoc’s dictionary of lost words [329 - 330]. Here we see words as things that can be . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 3

Give us your questions and thoughts right here. For my own part, you may have noticed that I didn’t do some summarizing thoughts + a poll last Friday like I usually do. Reason being, I was out of town camping in the woods. But that experience did give me an interesting perspective on Life A User’s Manual. Of course whenever you go camping you have to build a fire, and whenever you build a fire you enter into one of the strangest, most human experiences possible. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: The Best Critic of a Writer . . .

. . . is another writer. And thus I have taken Stephen Mitchelmore’s advice and checked in on Gabriel Josipovici’s sage critique of Life A User’s Manual. I encourage you all to do the same, although it will take a trip to your local library. Here’s the citation: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read Question Thread 2

Give me your questions, your answers for this week’s reading. And I’d like to pull this from last week’s question thread . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Life Big Read: A Better Mousetrap

As I read this week’s section, I felt that what was most coming though was the idea of quests that become traps. I first noticed this in that quote about Bartlebooth that I mentioned earlier this week and which I will reproduce here:

That’s what struck Valene the most, his gaze which did not manage to meet his own, as if Bartlebooth had sought to look behind his head, had wanted to pierce his head to reach beyond it in the neutral asylum of the stairwell with it’s trompe-loeil decorations mimicking old marbling and its staff skirting board made to resemble wood panelling. There was in that avoiding look something more violent than a void, something that was not merely pride or hatred, but almost panic, something like a mad hope, like an appeal for help, like a signal of distress. [142]

We also see this trope in the quest-stories that Perec tells, most notably in the utterly bizarre one about the nanny . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.

The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Translate This Book!

Spring 2011 Group Read

Book Lists

You Say

Popular Posts

Shop though these links = Support this site

Interviews from Conversational Reading

Group Reads

Reader Picks

Recommended Books

Archives

Categories