Life: A User's Manual Read online

  Rémi Rorschach buys from Olivier the last two flats still owned by the Gratiolet family at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

  Birth of Gilbert Berger.

  Olivier Gratiolet marries his nurse, Arlette Criolat.

  February: Morellet loses three fingers from his left hand.

  May: Grégoire Simpson loses his job at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra.

  May: Private view of Hutting’s “Hazes” at Gallery 22.

  7 May: Léon Salini concludes his investigation of the death of the Breidel couple.

  19 December: première of Schmetterling’s Malakhitès.

  1961 Disappearance of Grégoire Simpson.

  The Bergers move into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

  Dinteville ends his research.

  1962 The Plassaerts move into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

  Birth of Isabelle Gratiolet.

  First of Professor LeBran-Chastel’s “stolen” publications.

  1963 Birth of Rémi Plassaert.

  1964 Caroline Echard breaks with David Marcia.

  1965 Winckler begins to make Witches’ Mirrors.

  24 December: Arlette Criolat’s father strangles her, then commits suicide.

  1966 Caroline Echard marries Philippe Marquiseaux.

  Elzbieta Orlowska gets to Tunis at last.

  1967 The Silver Glen of Alva goes down.

  Birth of Mahmoud Orlowski.

  1968 Death of Mme Echard.

  Death of M. Marquiseaux.

  May: Elzbieta Orlowska flees from Tunisia and reaches Paris; Bartlebooth’s seamstress, Gervaise, retires; Elzbieta moves into her room.

  1969 Hutting sells a “Barricade” from Rue Gay-Lussac to an American collector.

  1970 “Young Riri” bumps into Paul Hébert at Bar-le-Duc.

  Mme Hourcade retires; the Réols move into the flat vacated by her; an imprudent purchase of a luxurious bedroom suite forces them to marry a few months later. Henri Fresnel comes back to see Alice, who then leaves almost straight away to stay with her son in New Caledonia.

  February: first joint meeting of Marvel Houses Incorporated and International Hostellerie; in November, foundation of Marvel Houses International and Incorporated Hostellerie.

  1971 Alice Fresnel writes to Mlle Crespi.

  4 June: David Marcia’s motorcycle accident in the 35th Gold Cup.

  December: the Rorschachs stay at St Moritz.

  1972 Beyssandre hired by Marvel Houses International.

  Mme Adèle retires.

  Death of Emilio Grifalconi.

  Serge Valène sees Bartlebooth for the last time.

  1973 Bartlebooth has an operation for a double cataract.

  Sam Horton changes sex.

  Beyssandre discovers Bartlebooth’s project.

  29 October: death of Gaspard Winckler.

  1974 Publication of Memories of a Struggler, by Rémi Rorschach.

  April: Beyssandre’s first letter to Bartlebooth; 11 July: Beyssandre calls on Smautf and challenges Bartlebooth.

  August: ruined by the Kerkennah Festival, David Marcia returns to live at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

  November: Morellet is put away.

  1975 25 April: Bartlebooth learns of the death of the cameramen entrusted with the destruction of the 438th jigsaw.

  May: Marvel Houses abandon their plans.

  23 June: death of Percival Bartlebooth.

  15 August: death of Serge Valène.

  In Memory of

  RAYMOND QUENEAU

  Georges Perec

  LIFE

  A USER’S MANUAL

  Fictions

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

  David Bellos

  Friendship, history, and literature have supplied me with some of the characters of this book. All other resemblances to living persons or to people having lived in reality or fiction can only be coincidental.

  G. P.

  Look with all your eyes, look

  (Jules Verne, Michael Strogoff)

  Preamble

  The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work

  (Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch)

  To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up – which the English word puzzle indicates so well – not only loses its raison d’être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.

  The role of the puzzle-maker is hard to define. In most cases – and in particular in all cardboard jigsaws – the puzzles are machine-made, and the lines of cutting are entirely arbitrary: a blanking die, set up once and for all, cuts the sheets of cardboard along identical lines every time. But such jigsaws are eschewed by the true puzzle-lover, not just because they are made of cardboard instead of wood, nor because the solutions are printed on the boxes they come in, but because this type of cut destroys the specific nature of jigsaw puzzles. Contrary to a widely and firmly held belief, it does not really matter whether the initial image is easy (or something taken to be easy – a genre scene in the style of Vermeer, for example, or a colour photograph of an Austrian castle) or difficult (a Jackson Pollock, a Pissarro, or the poor paradox of a blank puzzle). It’s not the subject of the picture, or the painter’s technique, which makes a puzzle more or less difficult, but the greater or lesser subtlety of the way it has been cut; and an arbitrary cutting pattern will necessarily produce an arbitrary degree of difficulty, ranging from the extreme of easiness – for edge pieces, patches of light, well-defined objects, lines, transitions – to the tiresome awkwardness of all the other pieces (cloudless skies, sand, meadow, ploughed land, shaded areas, etc.). and once the edges have been put together, the detail pieces put in place – the very light, almost whitish yellow fringe on the carpet on the table holding a lectern with an open book, the rich edging of the mirror, the lute, the woman’s red dress – and the bulk of the background pieces parcelled out according to their shade of grey, brown, white, or sky blue, then solving the puzzle consists simply of trying all the plausible combinations one by one.

  Pieces in puzzles of this kind come in classes of which the best-known are

  the little chaps

  the double crosses

  and the crossbars

  The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker undertakes to ask himself all the questions the player will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery, and subterfuge. All the elements occurring in the image to be re
assembled – this armchair covered in gold brocade, that three-pointed black hat with its rather ruined black plume, or that silver-braided bright yellow livery – serve by design as points of departure for trails that lead to false information. The organised, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless elements containing little information or signifying power, but also into falsified elements, carrying false information; two fragments of cornice made to fit each other perfectly when they belong in fact to two quite separate sections of the ceiling, the belt buckle of a uniform which turns out in extremis to be a metal clasp holding the chandelier, several almost identically cut pieces belonging, for one part, to a dwarf orange tree placed on a mantelpiece and, for the other part, to its scarcely attenuated reflection in a mirror, are classic examples of the types of traps puzzle-lovers come across.

  From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the Stairs, 1

  YES, IT COULD begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds. What happens behind the flats’ heavy doors can most often be perceived only through those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidents or accidents that happen in what are called the “common areas”, soft little sounds damped by the red woollen carpet, embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing. The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from storey to storey, from building to building, from street to street. They entrench themselves in their domestic dwelling space – since that is what it is called – and they would prefer nothing to emerge from it; but the little that they do let out – the dog on a lead, the child off to fetch the bread, someone brought back, someone sent away – comes out by way of the landing. For all that passes, passes by the stairs, and all that comes, comes by the stairs: letters, announcements of births, marriages, and deaths, furniture brought in or taken out by removers, the doctor called in an emergency, the traveller returning from a long voyage. It’s because of that that the staircase remains an anonymous, cold, and almost hostile place. In old buildings there used to be stone steps, wrought-iron handrails, sculptures, lamp-holders, sometimes a bench to allow old folk to rest between floors. In modern buildings there are lifts with walls covered in would-be obscene graffiti, and so-called “emergency” staircases in unrendered concrete, dirty and echoing. In this block of flats, where there is an old lift almost always out of order, the staircase is an old-fashioned place of questionable cleanliness, which declines in terms of middle-class respectability as it rises from floor to floor: two thicknesses of carpet as far as the third floor, thereafter only one, and none at all for the two attic floors.

  Yes, it will begin here: between the third and fourth storey at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. A woman of about forty is climbing the stairs; she is wearing a long imitation-leather raincoat and on her head a kind of felt hat shaped like a sugar-loaf, something like what one imagines a goblin’s hat to be, divided into red and grey squares. A big dun canvas hold-all, a case of the sort commonly called overnight bags, hangs on her right shoulder. A small cambric handkerchief is knotted through one of the chromed metal rings which attach the bag to its strap. Three motifs, which look as if they had been printed with a stencil, are regularly repeated over the whole fabric of the bag: a large pendulum clock, a round loaf cut through the middle, and a kind of copper receptacle without handles.

  The woman is looking at a plan held in her left hand. It’s just a sheet of paper, whose still visible creases attest to its having been folded in four, fixed by a paperclip to a thick cyclostyled volume – the terms of co-ownership relating to the flat this woman is about to visit. On the sheet there are in fact not one but three sketch-plans: the first, at the top right-hand corner, shows where the building is, roughly halfway along Rue Simon-Crubellier, which cuts at an angle across the quadrilateral formed by Rue Médéric, Rue Jadin, Rue de Chazelles, and Rue Léon Jost, in the Plaine Monceau district of the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris; the second, at the top left-hand corner, is a vertical cross-section of the building giving a diagrammatic picture of the layout of the flats and the names of some of the residents: Madame Nochère, concierge; Madame de Beaumont, second floor right; Bartlebooth, third floor left; Rémi Rorschach, television producer, fourth floor left; Dr Dinteville, sixth floor left, as well as the empty flat, sixth floor right, occupied by Gaspard Winckler, craftsman, until his death; the third plan, in the lower half of the sheet, is of Winckler’s flat: three rooms facing the street, kitchen and bathroom on the courtyard side, and a boxroom without natural light.

  The woman carries in her right hand a bulky set of keys, no doubt the keys of all the flats she has inspected that day; some are fixed to novelty key-rings: a miniature bottle of Marie Brizard apéritif, a golf tee and a wasp, a double-six domino, and a plastic octagonal token in which is set a tuberose flower.

  It is almost two years since Gaspard Winckler died. He had no child. He was not known to have any surviving family. Bartlebooth entrusted a notary with the task of finding any heirs he might have. His only sister, Madame Anne Voltimand, died in 1942. His nephew, Grégoire Voltimand, had been killed on the Garigliano in May 1944, at the breakthrough on the Gustav line. The notary took many months to unearth a third cousin of Winckler’s called Antoine Rameau, who worked for a manufacturer of knockdown divans. The taxes on the inheritance, added to the legal costs of the search for heirs, turned out to be so high that Antoine Rameau had to auction off everything. It is already a few months since the furniture was dispersed at the Sale Rooms, and a few weeks since the flat was bought by a property agency.

  The woman climbing the stairs is not the director of the property agency, but his assistant; she doesn’t deal with the commercial side, nor with customer relations, but only with the technical problems. From the property angle, the deal is a good one, the area is decent, the façade is of ashlar, the staircase is OK despite the agedness of the lift, and the woman is now coming to inspect in greater detail the condition of the flat itself, to draw up a more detailed plan of the accommodation with, for instance, thicker lines to distinguish structural walls from partitions and arrowheaded semicircles to show which way the doors open, and to decide on the work needed, to make a preliminary costing for complete refurbishment: the partition wall between the toilet and the boxroom to be knocked down, allowing the installation of a bathroom with a slipper-bath and WC; the kitchen tiles to be renewed; a wall-mounted gas-fired boiler (giving both central heating and hot water) to replace the old coal-fired boiler; the woodblock floor with its zigzag moulding to be lifted and replaced by a layer of cement, a felt underlay, and a fitted carpet.

  Not much is left of these three small rooms in which Gaspard Winckler lived and worked for nearly forty years. His few pieces of furniture, his small workbench, his jigsaw, his minute files have gone. On the bedroom wall, opposite his bed, beside the window, that square picture he loved so much is no longer: it showed an antechamber with three men in it. Two were standing, pale and fat, dressed in frock-coats and wearing top hats which seemed screwed to their heads. The third, similarly dresse
d in black, was sitting by the door in the attitude of a man expecting visitors, slowly putting a pair of tight-fitting new gloves on over his fingers.

  The woman is going up the stairs. Soon, the old flat will become a charming pied-à-terre, two recept. + bedr., all mod. cons., open outlook, quiet. Gaspard Winckler is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not finished yet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Beaumont, 1

  MADAME DE BEAUMONT’S drawing room is almost entirely filled by a concert grand, on the stand of which sits the closed score of a famous American melody, Gertrude of Wyoming, by Arthur Stanley Jefferson. An old man with his head covered with an orange nylon scarf sits in front of the piano, preparing to tune it.

  In the left-hand corner of the room there is a large modern armchair made of a huge hemisphere of steel-ringed Plexiglass on a chromed metal base. Beside it an octagonal block of marble serves as a low table; a steel cigarette lighter stands on it, as does a cylindrical pot-holder from which there emerges a dwarf oak tree, one of those Japanese bonsai plants whose growth has been so controlled, arrested, and altered that they show all the symptoms of maturity and even of old age almost without having grown at all, and about which growers say that their perfection depends less on the material care given to them than on the concentrated quality of meditation devoted to them.

  Lying directly on the light-coloured woodblock floor, slightly to the front of the armchair, is a wooden jigsaw puzzle of which virtually all the edges have been assembled. In the lower right-hand third of the jigsaw some additional pieces have been put in place: they depict the oval face of a sleeping girl, whose blonde hair is wound in plaits around her head and held over her forehead by a double band of plaited cloth; she leans her cheek on her cupped right hand as if in her dream she were listening to something.