I should start by confessing that it has taken me more than two years – if not three or four! – to finish reading Georges Perec’s novel, Life A User’s Manual. And why is that? Although it weighs in at 500 pages (in my 2008 Vintage paperback edition), it’s not the size of the book that has been the issue.
Although a fiction, the text is so detail-heavy, so removed from the emotional or judgemental – i.e. so factual – that it reads like non-fiction. More than that, it’s like the output from a vast – and vastly complex – research project, a labour of love. Indeed, at the end of my edition there is an index which runs to 59 pages, and a chronology that runs to 9. Is it any wonder that it has been compared to Ulysses, Joyce on steroids…
Can I say I enjoyed the reading experience? Certainly not. In the end, completing the book felt more like a challenge to be ticked off. Having said that, it’ i’s impossible not to admire the dedication, imagination and inventiveness of the work – and Perec’s stamina to keep at it for nine years.
Should you read it? I simply have no idea… Maybe if you’re after some kind of ‘rite of passage’…
Ian Gouge - Writer 