Life - Softcover

Perec, Georges

4.19

8,982 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002719991 ISBN 13: 9780002719995

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1988

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This marvellous book is one of the most ingenious works of modern fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Val ne wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of ever more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...

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Review:

"A dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination" (Paul Auster New York Times)

"An eccentric, madly ambitious scheme to display life all at once. The product of a hectically ingenious intelligence, like James Joyce's" (Victoria Glendinning The Times)

"Amazing, moving and lovable" (New Statesman)

"The finest novel to appear in French since Beckett's trilogy" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Very funny and very sad... A treasure-chest of stories, something to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever responded to works on the same scale and in the same spirit as Rabelais and Chaucer and Sterne" (Scotsman)

Book Description:

'The last major event in the history of the novel' Italo Calvino

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