(one weblog is not enough after spending the evening setting it up)
i must have been reading ‘life a user’s manual’ by georges perec for atleast four months now. sitting in my old flat shortly after buying it mr fish asked what i was reading and when i showed him he became ecstatic telling me stories about perec’s life (both mr fish and perec being french).
every now and then i pick it up and spend the a few days engrossed in the minute stories it paints of individuals, and the cross-hatched referencing of the inhabitants of an apartment block in paris.
why am i only at page 190?
– so far it seems consumable in bite-sized chunks (any bigger and i might choke)
– the 500 pages, due to the number of characters, is daunting
– some of the lives he describes are overly desirable in their oddness (the idea of a man learning to paint watercolours for 10 years, then he and his companion travelling around the world from 1935-1954, spending “two weeks in each port, inclusive of travelling time”, painting a watercolour at each port (500 in total), mailing each back to paris to be made in to a jigsaw puzzle with 750 pieces, and then spending the next 20 years reassembling the jigsaw puzzles at a rate of one a fortnight)