The Puzzle of Life

Life: A User's Manual opens with a meditation on the nature of puzzles, both literal and metaphorical. Perec's preamble likens the act of assembling a jigsaw to the process of making sense of life: the meaning of each piece emerges only in relation to the whole, and the puzzle's creator has anticipated every move of the solver. This analogy sets the stage for the novel's structure, which itself is a literary puzzle—each chapter a room, each room a story, all interlocking to form a vast, intricate pattern. The book's central conceit is that life, like a puzzle, is not a sum of isolated elements but a pattern in which the whole determines the parts. The reader is invited to look with all their eyes, to see the connections, echoes, and traps laid by the puzzle-maker—Perec himself.

The House as Universe

The novel's action is set almost entirely within 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, a Parisian apartment building. The house is both a physical structure and a universe of stories, each room containing its own world, its own dramas, secrets, and histories. The narrative moves systematically through the building, room by room, floor by floor, revealing the lives of its inhabitants, past and present. The house is a living organism, its communal spaces—stairs, cellars, corridors—serving as arteries through which the building's collective memory flows. The structure of the novel mimics the movement of a knight on a chessboard, ensuring that every space is visited, every story told, and every life, no matter how minor, is given its moment.

Bartlebooth's Grand Design

At the heart of the novel is the story of Percival Bartlebooth, an English millionaire who dedicates his life to a project of sublime futility. For ten years, he learns to paint watercolours; for twenty, he travels the world painting five hundred seascapes, each sent back to Paris to be turned into a jigsaw puzzle by the craftsman Winckler. Upon his return, Bartlebooth spends the next twenty years reassembling the puzzles, only to have each painting chemically erased and returned to the site where it was painted, leaving no trace. His project is a meditation on the meaning of life, the desire for order, and the inevitability of failure. Bartlebooth's quest is both heroic and absurd, a Sisyphean attempt to impose pattern and meaning on the chaos of existence.

The Art of Jigsaw

The motif of the jigsaw puzzle recurs throughout the novel, not only as Bartlebooth's obsession but as a metaphor for the book's own construction. The art of the puzzle lies not in the image but in the cut, the traps, the false leads, the cunning of the maker. Winckler, the puzzle-cutter, is both craftsman and adversary, designing each puzzle to confound Bartlebooth's expectations. The process of solving a puzzle—trial and error, flashes of insight, the disappearance of difficulty once a piece is placed—mirrors the process of reading the novel itself. Each story, each object, each character is a piece whose meaning emerges only in the context of the whole. The reader, like Bartlebooth, is both solver and victim of the puzzle-maker's design.

Portraits and Ghosts

The building is haunted by the ghosts of its past: suicides, murders, lost loves, vanished fortunes. Each room contains traces of former inhabitants, their stories layered like sediment. The narrative is filled with portraits—literal and figurative—of characters striving for meaning, recognition, or escape. There is the archaeologist Beaumont, who seeks a lost city and ends in despair; the singer Véra Orlova, whose daughter's tragic fate reverberates through generations; the artist Valène, who dreams of painting the entire building and its inhabitants in a single, all-encompassing canvas. The house is a mausoleum of ambitions, a gallery of vanished lives, each story echoing and refracting the others.

The Building's Inhabitants

Perec populates the building with a dazzling array of characters: artists, collectors, servants, businessmen, dreamers, and failures. Their lives intersect in unexpected ways—through marriages, affairs, rivalries, and shared tragedies. The stories of the tenants are told in fragments, anecdotes, inventories, and digressions, each contributing to the mosaic of the whole. Some are comic, others tragic; some are grand, others trivial. The building is a microcosm of society, its inhabitants linked by invisible threads of chance, habit, and history. The narrative delights in cataloguing their possessions, routines, and obsessions, finding meaning in the minutiae of daily life.

The Machinery of Fate

Underlying the stories is a meditation on fate, chance, and the limits of human agency. The characters' attempts to impose order—through art, science, business, or love—are repeatedly thwarted by accident, misunderstanding, or the passage of time. The building itself is subject to the forces of history: wars, fires, bankruptcies, and the slow erosion of memory. The machinery of the house—its lift, boiler, and plumbing—serves as a metaphor for the hidden systems that govern life, often breaking down at the worst possible moment. The narrative structure, with its mathematical precision and arbitrary constraints, both mimics and mocks the human desire for control.

The Collapse of Ambition

Many of the novel's stories are tales of ambition brought low: the archaeologist's failed quest, the businesswoman's hollow success, the artist's unfinished masterpiece, the collector's lost treasures. Bartlebooth's project, intended as a monument to order and will, is gradually undermined by blindness, death, and the interventions of others. The building itself, once a symbol of solidity and permanence, is revealed as fragile, subject to decay and eventual demolition. The novel is suffused with a sense of entropy—the slow, inevitable dissolution of all human endeavour.

The Unraveling of Stories

As the novel progresses, the stories begin to unravel, their connections multiplying and dissolving. The narrative becomes increasingly digressive, cataloguing objects, memories, and events in exhaustive detail. The book is filled with lists, inventories, genealogies, and appendices, each a futile attempt to capture the totality of experience. The stories loop back on themselves, characters reappear in new guises, and the boundaries between fact and fiction blur. The reader is drawn into a labyrinth of stories, each leading to another, with no final resolution.

The Endgame of Obsession

As Bartlebooth nears the end of his project, the obstacles mount: his eyesight fails, his assistants die or abandon him, and his adversaries conspire to thwart his plans. The final puzzle remains incomplete, the last piece stubbornly refusing to fit. The building's other inhabitants, too, reach the endgames of their own obsessions—some in triumph, most in defeat. The novel's structure, which has promised totality, reveals its own incompleteness. The end is not a solution but a recognition of the impossibility of closure.

The Last Piece Missing

In the novel's climactic scene, Bartlebooth dies at his table, the final piece of his last puzzle in hand. The piece, shaped like a W, does not fit the X-shaped hole left in the puzzle—a final, insoluble contradiction. The house, once teeming with life, is emptied by death, departure, and the passage of time. The painter Valène, who has dreamed of capturing the building in a single canvas, dies with his work unfinished, his canvas blank but for a grid of empty squares. The novel ends not with a solution but with an inventory of absences, a catalogue of what remains when all is gone.

The Painter's Empty Canvas

Valène's dream of painting the building and all its inhabitants is the novel's ultimate metaphor for the artist's quest to capture the fullness of life. His canvas, left blank at his death, is a symbol of both ambition and failure—the desire to encompass everything, and the inevitability of falling short. The novel itself is such a canvas: a vast, unfinished inventory of lives, objects, and stories, each incomplete, each haunted by what is missing. Perec's masterpiece is both a celebration of the richness of the world and a meditation on the impossibility of ever fully representing it.

The Infinite Inventory

Throughout the novel, Perec delights in lists, inventories, and taxonomies. Every room, every character, every object is described in loving, obsessive detail. The act of cataloguing becomes a way of asserting meaning in the face of chaos, of holding on to the fleeting and the lost. Yet the inventories are always incomplete, always haunted by what they cannot contain. The book's appendices, checklists, and indices are both a parody of scholarly thoroughness and a poignant acknowledgment of the limits of memory and art.

The House Dissolves

In the end, the house itself is doomed: threatened by developers, emptied by death and departure, it is destined to be demolished and replaced by something new. The stories, objects, and memories it contained are scattered, lost, or forgotten. Yet the pattern remains: the structure of the novel, the echoes between stories, the connections between lives. Perec's book is both an elegy for what is lost and a celebration of the patterns that persist, however fleetingly, in the face of time and entropy.

Characters

Percival Bartlebooth

Bartlebooth is the novel's central figure, a wealthy Englishman who devotes his life to a project of sublime, self-erasing futility: painting five hundred seascapes, having them turned into puzzles, reassembling them, and then erasing them from existence. His quest is a meditation on the desire for order, the fear of chaos, and the inevitability of failure. Bartlebooth is both heroic and tragic, his willpower matched only by the absurdity of his goal. His relationships—with his servant Smautf, the puzzle-maker Winckler, and the artist Valène—are defined by distance, formality, and a shared sense of purpose. As blindness and death overtake him, Bartlebooth's project unravels, leaving only the memory of his ambition and the void it sought to fill.

Gaspard Winckler

Winckler is the artisan who transforms Bartlebooth's watercolours into fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles. A solitary, meticulous man, Winckler is both collaborator and antagonist, designing each puzzle to confound Bartlebooth's expectations. His own life is marked by loss—his wife Marguerite's death leaves him adrift, and he eventually abandons his craft. Winckler's relationship with Bartlebooth is one of mutual dependence and rivalry, a battle of wills played out through the medium of the puzzle. His death marks the beginning of the end for Bartlebooth's project, and his legacy is the unsolvable nature of the final puzzle.

Serge Valène

Valène is the building's longest-standing resident, an aging painter who dreams of capturing the entire house and its inhabitants in a single, all-encompassing canvas. He is both observer and participant, chronicler and creator, haunted by the impossibility of his task. Valène's relationships—with Bartlebooth, Winckler, and the other tenants—are marked by empathy, nostalgia, and a sense of shared mortality. His unfinished canvas, left blank at his death, is the novel's final image: a symbol of both the ambition to represent everything and the inevitability of incompleteness.

Mortimer Smautf

Smautf is Bartlebooth's devoted butler, companion, and factotum, accompanying him on his travels and assisting in every aspect of his project. A man of routines and obsessions (notably, his endless calculations of factorials), Smautf is both comic and touching—a figure of loyalty, order, and quiet resignation. His presence links the various strands of Bartlebooth's life, and his departure after Bartlebooth's death signals the dissolution of the old order.

Véra Orlova / Madame de Beaumont

Véra Orlova, a Russian émigrée and celebrated singer, is the widow of the archaeologist Beaumont and the grandmother of Anne and Béatrice Breidel. Her life is marked by loss—her husband's suicide, her daughter's murder, the deaths of her family in the Russian Revolution. Véra is a figure of strength and endurance, maintaining the rituals of memory and mourning even as the world changes around her. Her story is one of survival in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

Anne and Béatrice Breidel

The granddaughters of Véra Orlova, Anne and Béatrice are orphans whose lives are shadowed by the violent deaths of their parents. Anne, the elder, is obsessed with self-improvement and scientific achievement, while Béatrice is a gifted classicist. Their relationship is marked by rivalry, affection, and the shared burden of their family's history. They represent the persistence of life and ambition in the aftermath of loss.

Madame Moreau

Madame Moreau is the building's senior resident, a self-made businesswoman who transforms a small family firm into a national enterprise. Her life is a study in adaptation, resilience, and the costs of success. She is both a figure of authority and a victim of her own ambition, her personal happiness sacrificed to the demands of business and social status. Her story is one of transformation and regret, a microcosm of the changing world outside the building.

Rémi Rorschach

Rorschach is a television producer, former music-hall performer, and would-be novelist whose life is a series of failed ventures and reinventions. He is a figure of vanity, nostalgia, and frustrated creativity, forever seeking recognition and control. His attempts to appropriate Bartlebooth's story for television mirror the novel's own preoccupation with narrative, authorship, and the impossibility of capturing reality.

The Plassaerts

Jean and Adèle Plassaert are traders in exotic goods, self-made and relentlessly practical. Their lives are governed by thrift, efficiency, and a passion for cataloguing. They represent the comic side of ambition—the desire for order, profit, and expansion, pursued with single-minded zeal. Their story is one of adaptation, resourcefulness, and the absurdities of modern commerce.

Elzbieta Orlowska

Elzbieta is a Polish émigrée who flees Tunisia with her son, Mahmoud, and carves out a life in Paris through resilience and hard work. Her story is one of displacement, cultural negotiation, and maternal devotion. She is both an outsider and a vital part of the building's community, her presence a reminder of the wider world beyond the house's walls.

Plot Devices

The Jigsaw Puzzle Structure

The novel's structure is modeled on a jigsaw puzzle: each chapter corresponds to a room in the building, and the order of chapters follows a knight's tour of the chessboard, ensuring that every space is visited without repetition. This device allows Perec to explore the building's physical and narrative architecture, creating a sense of totality while foregrounding the arbitrariness of order. The stories, like puzzle pieces, are meaningful only in relation to the whole, and the reader is invited to assemble the fragments into a coherent pattern.

Inventories and Catalogues

Perec's narrative is filled with lists, inventories, and catalogues—of objects, people, events, and memories. This device serves both to evoke the richness of the world and to highlight the impossibility of capturing it in its entirety. The act of cataloguing becomes a way of asserting meaning in the face of chaos, but the inventories are always incomplete, haunted by what they leave out. The novel's appendices, indices, and checklists parody scholarly thoroughness while acknowledging the limits of memory and art.

Interlocking Stories and Recurring Motifs

The novel's stories are interwoven, with characters, objects, and themes recurring in different contexts. Motifs—such as puzzles, paintings, lost objects, and failed projects—reappear throughout, creating a web of connections that both unify and complicate the narrative. The stories loop back on themselves, and the boundaries between fact and fiction blur. This device reinforces the sense of the novel as a labyrinth, a pattern without a center.

Metafiction and Self-Reference

Life: A User's Manual is deeply self-referential, constantly drawing attention to its own artifice, structure, and constraints. The novel is both a story and a commentary on storytelling, a puzzle and a meditation on the nature of puzzles. The characters' projects—Bartlebooth's self-erasing art, Valène's impossible painting, Rorschach's failed television adaptation—mirror the author's own quest to capture the totality of life in a book. The novel's ending, with its blank canvas and missing puzzle piece, is both a conclusion and a refusal of closure.

Foreshadowing and Circularity

The novel is filled with foreshadowing—hints of deaths, departures, and the eventual demolition of the building. The stories are circular, returning to their beginnings, echoing earlier events, and anticipating their own unraveling. The structure of the book, with its mathematical precision and arbitrary constraints, both promises and withholds totality. The final image of the missing puzzle piece is a symbol of the impossibility of completion, the persistence of absence at the heart of all pattern.

Analysis

Life: A User's Manual is a monumental exploration of the ways in which we seek to impose order, meaning, and permanence on the chaos of existence. Through its intricate structure, exhaustive detail, and interlocking stories, the novel celebrates the richness and complexity of life while acknowledging the inevitability of loss, failure, and incompleteness. Perec's masterpiece is both playful and profound, a puzzle that delights in its own insolubility. It invites the reader to become a participant in the act of assembly, to find connections, echoes, and patterns in the fragments of narrative. Yet it also insists on the limits of such efforts: every inventory is incomplete, every project is undone by time, every story is haunted by what is missing. The novel's ultimate lesson is that meaning is found not in the completion of the puzzle, but in the act of assembling it—in the connections we make, the stories we tell, and the patterns we glimpse, however fleetingly, in the flux of life.

Last updated: May 3, 2025