Perec's "Life: a user's manual"

If some of the considerations of narrative as a vehicle to interpret and generate space that have been presented in the post entitled " Architecture through narration", this novel "Life: a user's manual" of Georges Perec, goes much further. It is an evocative, suggestive and even practical example of how a narrative can be architecture and how space can be an assemblage of tales, stories and plots.

The structure:
The novel structure is based on a fictitious building as if it would be seen in cross-section and without facade. It created a grid of 10x10 that Perec uses to establish a very strict conditions. The novel follow the order of the knight's tour on this grid. It starts each chapter (99) in one of the rooms that form the block. The time varies between chapters so the time is not the conductor of the events which is actually the space. By laborious and high detailed descriptions from the space to furniture and miscellaneous, then characters cloths and finally a tale, story or part of any of the different plots.
The movement of the knight is completed by the graeco-latin square as a way to add a list of different references that Perec established at the beginning.


the subject:
In this novel, or novels, in plural, even if there is a plot which is more developed and more important, that of Bartlebooth's plan, the real subject is the building. It is space and not time nor Bartlebooth's plot which establish a relation between all the fragments that form this work.

the plot and plots:
The plot in itself is the British multimillionaire Bartlebooth's plan for his whole life to spent 10 years learning to paint watercolours to go through the world during 20 years and paint one watercolour in a different seaport each fortnight until reach a number of 500. At the same time, once the watercolour is painted this is send back to Paris where a craft man converts it into a puzzle. When the 500 puzzles are ready he should spend 20 years reassemblaging each and sending them to the original port in order to dissolve them into the sea and recover the original blank paper.
He did not finish his plan, as the main characters of the stories that are told in the novel, neither. But as well as Bartlebooth's plot all of the stories are very singular and complicate, personal challenges that if not useful in all the cases, fulfill the lives of the characters.

Self-reference:
The novel is based on multiple fragments that the building relates where Bartlebooth's plot specially is a self-reference of the processes that Perec is using to write his novel. The processes of creating puzzles and resolve them, comparable with the writer and the reader or the architect and the user.
The logic of assemblage is shown as particular and the book is written taking into account and facilitating personal different perspectives.