Life A Users Manual - post V

This collection of stories housed in a single book – a perfect metaphor for the apartment block he is describing in the text – continues to bombard you with an amazing amount of detail while moving the development of the Bartlebooth and Winckler story on slightly further.

There is also a great literary device that Perec uses to not only bring you up to speed on the number of different storylines going on in the book but it is also reassuring that you feel you haven’t missed any off the list and it gives you a taster of what is to come. You go straight into a couple on the list.

Bullet points from pages 210 - 266

* The story of how Winckler met his wife, an excellent miniaturist, is told and how he reacted after her death giving birth to a stillborn baby, removing his apartment of nearly all traces of her before returning back to the jigsaws he had to cut for Bartlebooth

* Then there are a couple of stories told of someone who spent a year or two collecting cuttings on anything to do with the opera before being told that the library has to make cuts and the job is going to be done by a guard

* One other story that leaps out is the one about the jeweller who is killed and there are all three suspects who each tried to kill him but in reality it was a heart attack that was caused by someone who had discovered he wiped out a village in Africa to gain his fortune

All along there is such a web being weaved with the attention to detail being phenomenal with paintings, newspaper crosswords and the décor being analysed as if you are being walked through the apartment block in a cinematic way

More hopefully over the weekend…