book review - A Void

It would be foolhardy to pretend that this entire book makes immediate sense. But that does not make it any less enjoyable and as every page turns and the plot deepens you are not only engrossed but continually amazed that Georges Perec put this novel together without using a single ‘e’.

In a postscript the author admits that he was partly put up to the challenge as a bet by a friend but then as he started he discovered that it challenged his approach to writing and he became almost obsessional about the task.

The book starts following the thoughts of Anton Vowl who starts to note down thoughts in his diary about a void. He feels he is being sucked into the void and then sure enough he disappears. His small collection of friends meets and agrees that they will do their best to help solve the mystery.

They are connected initially by their mutual friendship with Vowl but as it unfolds they discover more intimate bloodlines flow between them and importantly with the missing man and that is why they all face the prospect of death.

One by one they either disappear or are killed. As the net tightens ironically the plot widens and events of the past are connected with the deaths and disappearances and a family feud is uncovered. Although there is a killer on the loose the void that the characters are falling into is the absence of e.

At the close of the book the character walking out of Proust, detective Swann, is happy killing the final victims, and even with the mystery solved there is a dark humour running through the book until the end. There are some hidden moments for those that have a knowledge of French literature with a nod to Poe and the Murder on the Rue Morgue as well as Proust. No doubt there are others but those were the two that I managed to recognise.

Most of the stuff about mathematics and philosophy did pass me by but in the end it is not as crucial to understanding the story and is part of Vowl’s world and setting up the idea that he is somehow trying to pinpoint the sense of the void. This only really starts to get going once Vowl has gone and the different characters meet at the country estate of one of Vowl’s acquaintances and discuss the case. Then one by one the different characters face up to their destiny and meet an odd and untimely death.

Ultimately though you either sign up for this experience or you don’t. Personally it was sometimes hard going and the pace that was caused by different and sometimes static language made it difficult to follow. But there is a story there and it emerges strongly at the climax. What is the point of language if it is not there to experiment with and play around with? Perec pushes it here all the way but does so with a smile and a great deal of intelligence.

This was more of a journey than most books but in the end the complex murder mystery and the void causes by the absence of e leave you deep in thought with the same smile Perec probably had on his face when he finished writing this.

Version read – Vintage paperback

A Void - post VII

Finally coming to the end you have to sit back and wonder at the feat and also applaud the plot. With its twists and turns it only becomes clear at the end what has happened although justice is not forthcoming.

Anton Vowl never reappears nor does any chance that the curse that has followed him and his siblings will be avoided. A twisted case of sibling rivalry means that all those that are the children of two sons that were meant to have died are destined to be murdered. Not only were Haig and Vowl brothers but also Olga was their sister and Ottivani the policeman turns out to be a brother as well.

He dies revealing that the text contained not a single

But there follows a postscript with Perec admitting that he set out on the project partly as a bet to prove he could to a friend and then because he enjoyed the discipline that having to stick to a formula gave him. He expresses a feeling that is palpable in the text that unlike other stories he had written this one really did force him to be inventive in a different way.

“Initially I found such a constraint faintly amusing, if that; but I stuck to my guns. At which point, finding that it took my imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and byways, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, plunging into it again and again, at last giving up all my ongoing work, much of which I was actually about to finish.”

It is a strange book that doesn’t come together until the end and the void is the missing e but it is a work of real concentration. The best description of what it is all about comes from ones of the quotes Perec chooses to print over the last two pages:

“...should we retrieve the letter which has been lost or the sign which has been effaced, should we reconstruct the dissonant scale, we shall regain our authority in the world of the mind.”
Gerard De Nerval

A Void - post VI

Wikipedia can be great but it can also plant ideas and thoughts in your mind that might not have been there and as a result it clouds your thinking. For example the reference to A Void quotes from an article by an academic that argues that the void is the absence of the letter e, which in turn means that key words like mother and father in French cannot be uttered.

But there is a point at which two of Vowl’s friends realise they have the same father and refer to him as papa making you wonder. It also gets you thinking about how the absence of the letter in itself would become the void. There seem to be other issues here about hereditary curses and the coincidence of blood ties.

It has now entered the territory of an Agatha Christie novel in terms of there just being a few characters left standing, with one dropping dead with almost every other chapter. The police have arrived but they don’t seem to be getting anywhere and if anything face being sucked into the void along with everyone else. The only one who seems to be above the fray is Squaw the housekeeper and my money is on the key to the mystery being with her.

Tomorrow should tell…

A Void - post V

Although I am not going to pretend I know exactly what is going on this is starting to grip you because the mystery deepens and more people start dying.

As each character tells their stories the links between them start to unravel and family feuds and curses appear to be the driving force behind the deaths and disappearances. There are some mystical references that to be honest would require a little bit more reading around the subject to get to grips with.

But you can safely say that 200 pages in to the 285 page novel and you want to find out what happened to the mysterious Anton Vowl and just where he is and what became of him. Did he escape the curse following him, which had already claimed his brother Douglas Haig or did he fail? His friends are starting to think he failed but it is not yet clear.

More tomorrow…

A Void - post IV

A couple of things to declare before we get into this:

I am drunk

I am tired

Tonight has been the awards night for my magazine and playing the role of the host has been taxing.

Before the awards started read a bit of A Void and another character died after discovering that the past si interlinked with the present. Nothing more can be said because it is too mysterious and I haven't got the energy to write more.

More tomorrow...

A Void - post III

As you read A Void you can’t help but think of Perec scratching his head doing the research. A great example is the pieces of evidence that are presented by Anton Vowl’s friends to try and establish where he has gone.

Among the diaries and thoughts are six excerpts from famous writers ranging from Milton to Shakespeare – without the e’s – but nowhere is there an e to be seen.

Mind you nowhere is the character of Vowl to be seen. But the other characters around him are now getting some flesh on the bones with Olga an opera singer who can be found at her father-in-laws. She was widowed after just a few days when her husband was killed in a freak accident and died without any apparent cause of death.

They are also joined by a British friend who adds to the anglophile feeling with Olga’s husband being named Douglas Haig after the famous British figures of that name.

It is still hard to know what is going on and still a challenge to stay with Perec but in the sense that it keeps you awake on the train then this book does that and makes you work a bit with the old grey cells.

More tomorrow…

A Void - post II

Before he disappeared Anton Vowl sent messages to several friends to tip them off that something has happened or is going to happen. The clues lead them to the zoo, to a lawyer who is holding Anton’s diaries and then to yet another friend who has more information.

The diaries seem to obsess about Moby Dick and the way the whale pulled them all into the void. But at the same time another well-known solicitor dies and at the funeral the friends meet up and are witnesses to the coffin dropping, opening and being revealed as empty.

That concludes the section on Anton and the narrative moves onto focus on the next stage of the investigation. One oddity, although how can you single out one in a book full of them, is the way that most of the male characters have lost their children in unusual circumstances.

It is hard to keep up with it sometimes as the narrative goes off at tangents and the plot moves backwards and forwards through literary and mathematical references. Numbers and characters seem to be important although not always clear. Even as a reader you sense the book dropping through a void in the middle of Anton Vowl’s rug taking you and everything else along with it.

More tomorrow…

A Void - post I

Sometimes you get reminded just how adventurous literature can be. Okay it sounds contrived to produce a novel without using a single letter ‘e’ but what ambition trying to do it. As you start reading you spend a few pages just trying to find an escaped ‘e’ and there are moments when he inserts a dash or apostrophe where a e should have been. But most of the time he simply chooses to express the story without using words containing ‘e’s.

The result is odd, not in an unpleasant way, but there is a different rhythm. The story is also written in a way that is no necessarily easy to get to grips with. There are hidden jokes, with famous French literary characters popping up, and references to mathematical and philosophical debates that are far out of my realm.

But at the heart of the story there is a character named Anton Vowl who becomes obsessed with the idea that he is slipping into a void. He suffers from insomnia and becomes more unable to distinguish between reality and dreams. He commits his increasingly random thoughts to paper and then disappears.

More tomorrow...

book of books - Life A Users Manual

When you try to describe this book to someone you realise the ambition of Georges Perec. He describes a Parisian apartment block and then goes through it room by room describing the notable features and objects and telling the stories of those who lived in the rooms both past and present. At points he goes off on long interesting tangents and at others he concentrates of a developing story that concludes the book. In between he redefines the reading experience with lists of the tales that feature in the book as well as illustrations of the words that occasionally pop up on books and papers in the apartment.

There is no chance that this review can do the book justice, not because it is some work of genius that is above criticism, but because it is in place indefinable and as a result you might be able to pin down one part that works or doesn’t work but there are 100 other parts that are different.

Plot summary
There are several different things going on here with a story of the puzzle maker and the puzzle solver with Winckler and Bartlebooth; a comment on the state of Paris by the way the building is threatened by destruction; along with that there are lots of different stories, some short and some long, about the people who live in the flats. But at the end he manages to compress it all into seconds and that is one of the most powerful moments of the book, when you realise that all of these observations have been made without time passing more than a fraction of a few seconds. But the story that you are left with is one of a rich Englishman Bartlebooth who spends ten years learning how to paint watercolours, twenty years painting 500 different ports and then sending them back for Winckler to make into 750-piece jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth then solves the puzzles at a rate of one a fortnight and sends them back to where they were created and they are dipped into the water and the blank sheet of paper is sent back to him – a pointless life’s work but one that is completely harmless. But in the end it is made hazardous by the interest from the media, the personal cost to Bartlebooth with blindness and the almost bitter battle he plays out against Winckler who puts traps into the puzzles with the way he shapes the pieces. There are a hundred plus stories that run alongside this one but ultimately it is the Bartlebooth story you remember and it is with his death that the book concludes.

IS it well written?
You will probably struggle to find a book that is similar to this in ambition and style. It is brilliant at weaving a web that maintains the interest and continues to show what life is like in Paris and how it has changed. In a way this is a psychological battle over a jigsaw, a social history of Paris and a series of tales that are of differing interest. But it is never dull and you have to credit Perec with a style that keeps it going. Part of the reason it does keep going is because unlike Proust, who is equally ambitions in using objects to describe an era or a person, Perec reels off long lists of paintings and books but in a very detached way that allows the reader to walk through the apartment block almost like a museum or in some ways as a ghost travelling between the past and the present.

Should it be read?
This should be tackled by anyone who wants to see what French literature had to say for itself in the 1960s and 70s. There is a hint of the heavy war time legacy with a couple of characters having wartime obsessions but most of the book illustrates a society that is class ridden, based on money as well as heritage, and although living in a community still deeply individualistic. From a budding writer point of view it shows how far you can push a style, from a reader’s point of view makes you dwell on the thin line between a tale and real experience and from a sociologist point of view provides a great idea of the differences between people living all within a few metres of each other.

Summary
A society is shown through the world of an apartment block with the puzzle of life never quite being solved

Version read – Harvill paperback

Life A User's Manual - post VIII

Hurrah it's only been a week and a half but at last a book gets completed.

All of a sudden – and there is not too much space left anyway – the Bartlebooth story starts to dominate and the anecdotes start to lean in onto the development of that core story.

By this stage of the book you start to value the style, which is best described as a detached Proust, his gaze never misses anything but there is not the emotional involvement with it and you can go from a story about a triple murder to something about a hotel chain without barely pausing for breath.

The ending comes and you are left wanting more - more of the stories of the people who lived in the apartment block and more of the tales that its objects inspire.

Bullet points between pages 410 – 500

* The story of Helene Borodin is told with her deciding to seek her own form of justice by tracking down her husband’s killers and snuffing them out one by one before heading back to France from America

* Then there is a long-winded description of how two hotel groups signed a strategic deal to try and compete with the growing number of multinational competitors by setting up the most exclusive hotels in the world

* Along with providing guests unique experiences like their own ski slopes the hotel chain plans to offer some of the most unique art and after hiring a well known critic Beyssandre and gives him five years to find the most famous art

* He reads about the Bartlebooth painting, jigsaw making, puzzle solving and then destruction and decides that those pictures would be the most unique in the world and after writing to Bartlebooth indicates he is prepared to start killing to get his hands on the pictures

* Just as it seems that the pictures will have to be destroyed in another way the hotel chain folds and nothing more is heard of the critic and Bartlebooth can return to his struggle to finish the puzzles

* There is then a tale of the young Reol family who are almost bankrupted by their desire to have a luxurious bedroom suite but just as it seems to be black things are saved; then there is the tale of the man who believes Hitler is alive; and a final mention of Hutting the painter

* But the book closes with Bartlebooth dying with Winckler’s final twist in his hand, a jigsaw piece that should be an X shape which is fact shaped as a W with him gone his old water colour teacher also dies and his servant disappears bringing to an end one of the main characters of the apartment block

As things reach their conclusion with Bartlebooth there is an incredibly powerful reminder that this entire book has been describing real time of just a few minutes and as an achievement this book is an incredible one

A review will follow over the weekend…

Life A User's Manual - post VII

There is an amazing capacity to go deeply into what you might see as odd tangents. For instance a boy reading a magazine about an adventurer in Egypt is focused on and the entire story is relayed. Likewise the entire history of people and the stories in paintings and maps is told in full.

Bullet points between pages 366 – 410

* The story of the ex resident who became a famous cyclist who rode the tour de France is told including what happened to him after he finished racing he becomes a pace setter and after a while becomes jealous of his protégé and takes him on a time trial that ends in a crash and disfigurement

* The disfigured cyclist asks for the pacesetters sisters hand in marriage and after getting it they last a few months before she runs away and he goes to South America where he becomes rich, pays for surgery and comes back for his true love

* You get the entire story of an Arabic speaking Frenchman who is sent by napoleon I to get a pact with the Barbary leader as a result of a boy who is reading about it in a magazine on the stairs while he waits for5 his grandfather a piano tuner

* Bartlebooth goes blind making his jigsaws and has to hire help to explain to him what the pieces are shaped like and what they depict

* Then there is the story told of a judge and his wife who steal for the sexual excitement it causes who are eventually caught and as a result sent to prison and their flat is inherited by the butler

More tomorrow…

Life A User's Manual - post VI

A better day on the Life A User’s Manual front but still not as much consumed, as I would have liked. The best thing to do is to pick out a couple of stories although there is again a slight advance in the Bartlebooth story that seems to link in with most of the other main characters.

Bullet points between pages 266 – 338

* There are some moments which would be perfect as a way of showing someone not reading this book what it was like and the collection of things that have been found on the stairs shows the exhaustive imagination that is being deployed here

* As usual there are some stories that stand out with the painter Hutting using a colour palette based on price as one story that sticks in the mind along with the German scientist who tried to recapture the spirit of the experiments he made during the war another

* But it is with a sense of reassurance as you get back to the more solid platforms of some of the stable characters of Madame Moureau and Bartlebooth and you hear about her disagreements over the development of her kitchen and start to learn more about his problems with jigsaws

* Setting himself the task of completing a jigsaw every two weeks starts to become harder not just because of age and boredom but because Winckler the maker of the puzzles views each of the 750 piece puzzles as connected to one large puzzle

* He makes the challenge for Bartlebooth difficult because he sets booby traps that are not sprung until several puzzles have gone by and puts shapes and inconsistencies into the shapes of the pieces that remind the rich Englishman who is really in control

More tomorrow…

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…

Life A User's Manual - post IV

The central story about Bartlebooth and the jigsaws does not progress a great deal but there are a couple more singular stories that are culled from the past and present inhabitants of the Parisian apartment block.

Bullet points between pages 155 – 210

* Bartlebooth advertised for a jigsaw maker who would be prepared to make a jigsaw a fortnight for twenty years and was sent 12 applications and Winckler stood out not just because of his technique but because of his age, which at 22 meant he would live through the task

* Each jigsaw once made was put into its own box that had the location and the date put on in a uniform manner with a label that was added to a collection that awaited Bartlebooth’s return from his travels

* Elsewhere there is the story told about a former inhabitant of the block who ran foul of the Gestapo and was sent to a concentration camp after his role in a bomb and shooting plot at a hotel

* One of the other tales that stands out is about the concierge who fell out with one of the tenants after she was given food to use while the woman went on holiday but was then asked for it back after the tenant’s holiday went wrong and the embarrassment has caused problems between them ever since

More tomorrow…

Life A User's Manual - post III

The extent of Bartlebooth's ambitions are laid out with him decideing to spend ten years learning every day how to paint watercolours before heading off for twenty years to paint 500 ports in 500 different places. He then sent the pictures back on a fortnightly basis for Winckler to cut up into 750 jigsaw pieces. After he had solved the puzzles, at the rate of one a fortnight they would be repaired and then sent back to the port they were painted in and the watercolour would be dipped in water returning it to its original state. The motivation is that Bartlebooth wanted to do something that would consume his life but at the end leave no trace.

Around that central story there are so many other stories being told that this is more than just one book. You get sidetracked pleasantly into other areas before being brought back into another room in the building.

Bullet points between pages 105 - 155

* Bartlebooth is virtually housebound and is struggling to get through his jigsaws with most of the enjoyment gone whereas for his butler each ones reminds him of some ports on their twenty year painting trip

* The story is then told of Appenzzell who is related to someone living in the block who went missing in the jungle on a field trip to investigate native tribes and after returning to Paris he runs off again to join the tribe

* He spends five years living with them and following them around until the penny drops that they want him to go away and are contunially moving to more inhospitable places to try and get the message across that they don't like him

* Another story is told of the daughter of Madame de Beaumont who killed a baby she was meant to be looking after as an au pair and fled leaving the mother to lose her mind in grief and kill herself

* The husband spends years tracking the woman down until he eventually kills her and her husband and a letter from him ends up in the hands of Madame de Beaumont explaining how he wasted his firtune tracking her down and killed her before he took his own life

It is very difficult trying to encapsulate the contents of this book but hopefully you are getting the idea that it is a mammoth series of different stories, some short and some longer, but it is enjoyable and not the sort of struggle you might have expected from something of this length and ambition.

The only thing is that you tend to just let the numerous names and room descriptions start to flow over you a bit. Not sure that is a wise thing to do. More tomorrow...

Life A User's Manual - post II

This is quite a hard book to produce daily highlights from because it is not only going back and forth between the different characters that live/lived in the apartments in the block but it is also able to go off into deep tangents telling stories about different former tenants or even stories and legends that are connected to some of the objects and pictures in the building.

The result is that you are clinging to a central character, Bartlebooth, who seems to link in with most of the other tenants in the building either directly through a financial relationship or through reputation. He is the one who is obsessed with the jigsaws and painting the pictures that are used to make them spending his fortune and numerous years of his life painting ports from all over the world.

But at the same time of unwrapping the Bartlebooth story, and there are glimpses that it will become a major tale, there is the room by room floor by floor exploration of the apartment building.

Bullet points between pages 40 – 105

* The introductions of the characters that live in the building continues with the butler of Bartlebooth who at 80 continues to work for his master and was instrumental in organising a trip across a couple of decades where his master painted 500 different ports

* Every couple of weeks the watercolours were sent back to Winckler who turned them into jigsaws and kept the building alive with the sound of his jigsaw

* Elsewhere there is a chance to tell the story of the family who owned the building and their mixed fortunes which meant ever greater diminishing returns from it for not only them but also for their children

* Then there is a moment when an American author arrives to research a book she is writing about Bartlebooth’s uncle who was taken in by conmen trying to sell him the vase that Joseph used to store the blood of Christ

* There is also a lengthy piece about Madame Moureau who saw the DIY boom coming and managed to become very wealthy on the back of it and several pages are used listing some of the goods her company sells in its catalogues

* Madame Moureau, who is now a bed-ridden cripple, had her apartment designed to incredibly luxurious standards to show off her position and standing as a successful businesswoman and combined with the central heating that was out in it turned the block into a building site for a year

Perec is very fluid with time with the pendulum swinging back and forwards between the past and the present with such ease it is sometimes hard to tell who is a tenant and who is a memory. He also continues to spend a lot of energy explaining the details of each and every picture that are on the walls in the numerous rooms in the block. There must be a reason for doing that but it is not clear yet. More tomorrow…

Life A User's Manual - post I

Last night I stood by the bookcase and had Road to Calvary in my hand but thought about it and chose something else from a French author. There is also a picture of the author Georges Perec on the back, which is one of the oddest writers I have ever seen, and it either inspires or puts off. I opted for the former and so started Life A User’s Manual and Road to Calvary will have to wait.

Bullet points between pages 1 – 40

* There is a preamble at the start the talks about jigsaw pieces which makes the interesting point that although you put a jigsaw together on your own the maker is always there with you because they have worked out your reactions in advance

* The story starts describing a woman walking up the stairs in an apartments block on her way to visit a flat that has been empty since its occupant died - who has planned some sort of intricate revenge - so she can assess its value for a sale

* She holds in her hands a map of the block and some details of the interior structure and the tenants the live on the different floors around the flat which provides Perec with a chance to take the narrative in a different direction

* He introduces the family of an archeologist who committed suicide after failing to discover ruins he had staked his career on, an artist who has a studio in the attic, a wealty jigsaw lover and their various servants

* The theme that is starting to develop appears to be around the area of jigsaws with the dead man from the flat making them, his fellow wealthy tenant enjoying them and others in the building being paid to help store and look after them

Perec has a great style which opens up the apartment block not so much room by room but person by person with a fascination with the pictures each character has on their walls and he says almost as much about their art as he does about them. More tomorrow...