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

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
With the James Wood review in this week's New Yorker, it's official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the... »
Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?
The new book isn't getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media... »
On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature
Maybe this is why I've generally found Simon Critchley's philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull... »
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of... »
See Attacks, Vicious
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we... »
Review of Varamo
The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just... »
Explanation
AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald): So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of... »
I Wouldn’t Have Guessed That
Lev Grossman talking about reviewing books is a little like that 50 Shades of Grey person talking about bring an author. Here,... »
More on Bolano’s Journalist
The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez. This caught... »
Someone Save Criticism from The Atlantic
It's amazing that in 2012 The Atlantic can still publish something so clueless as this. Titled "Could the Internet Save Book... »

Jeff Waxman: Not only do I not think HHhH is bad, I think it's pretty dam
vfrancone: I am halfway through HHhH right now and I don't think it is
Richard: I have become a big fan of Simon Critchley, and of Tom McCar
James: I've had the original edition standing by for just such an o
Edward Champion: This can never be overstated. George RR Martin blurbed Lev.
Sawn: This is a similar theme to the Atlantic article about all th
Travis Godsoe: That's a great review, Scott. It brought back the mysterious

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

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

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