Word: perecent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...home. Track and field, in particular, was a treasure trove: a ninth gold medal for Carl Lewis in the long jump; redemption for Dan O'Brien in the decathlon; a world record in the 100 m for Donovan Bailey; a first-course 200/400 double for Marie-Jose Perec of France, Guadeloupe and Beverly Hills, California; and his-and-hers gold medals for triple jumper Kenny Harrison and his girlfriend, 100-m winner Gail Devers. Then there were the Johnsons: Allen, who won the 110-m hurdles; Michael; and Michael...
Some skepticism may be permissible. The Gallic taste for abstractions and literary fun and games is not universally shared. And wordplay, no matter how winsome, does not travel well from one language to another. In any case, English-speaking readers can now examine Perec's most acclaimed book for themselves. At first glance, Life: A User's Manual looks every bit as good as the French have been saying it is for years...
This despite a number of intentional difficulties that ought to make the work unreadable. The setting is a capacious apartment house in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris. Each of Perec's 99 chapters takes place in a different room or locale in the building. Scrupulous attention is paid to the furnishings, wallpaper, paintings, knickknacks and impedimenta in each new scene. The time is shortly before 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. That is when the action begins and when it ends. In other words, this book has no forward movement, no fundamental plot...
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...