Word: bartlebooth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What it possesses instead is the slow, hypnotic fascination of an enormous puzzle being assembled piece by piece. Perec makes his jigsaw methods quite explicit. One of the residents in the apartment house is a wealthy Englishman named Percival Bartlebooth, whose past, along with those of dozens of other tenants, gradually emerges. In 1925, Bartlebooth embarks on the rigid program he has mapped out for the rest of his life. He spends ten years learning how to paint watercolors. For the next 20 years he travels the globe, rendering one seaport scene roughly every two weeks and sending each painting...
Given the fascinating eccentricities that crop up on nearly every page of this novel, Bartlebooth's plan seems almost humdrum. From the most straitened (and self-imposed) circumstances, Perec spins forth an infinite variety of entertainments, hundreds of tales, anecdotes, puzzles, mysteries, conundrums and diversions. Do the glittering pieces add up to a radiant whole? While the fun proceeds, this question seems irrelevant. At the end, it teases and haunts...
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