Published by aco on 23 Sep 2009 at 06:25 pm
new book arrival｜新書上架
Georges Perec
Life A User’s Manual(Revised Edition)
Paperback $190
ISBN: 9781567923735 Published July 2009
660頁，99個單元，這本1978年面世的小說把時間與空間鎖定在巴黎某公寓，1975年6月23日晚上8時。每個住戶不凡有的故事拼湊出一張人生平面圖。被公認為二十世紀最偉大小說之一，此為二十週年紀念新訂版。
One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.
— Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
Those who have a taste of the unusual, for books that create worlds unto themselves, will be dazzled by this crazy-quilt monument to the imagination.
— Paul Auster, New York Times Book Review
Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as “one of the great novels of the century.” We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User’s Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future.
Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante’s Commedia and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce’s Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time — 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 — Perec’s spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block’s one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.
Georges Perec (1936 – 1982), was winner of the Prix Renaudot and Prix Médicis. His books include W or the Memory of Childhood, Things: A Story of the Sixties & A Man Asleep, “53 Days”, A Void, Three by Perec, and Thoughts of Sorts. He died of cancer in 1982.
伸延閱讀｜of related interest
Georges Perec
Thoughts of Sorts
Paperback $140
ISBN: 9781567923629 Published August 2009
Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec’s final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985. With this translation, David Bellos, Perec’s preeminent translator, has completed the Godine list of Perec’s great works translated into English and has provided an introduction to this master of “systematic versatility.” Thoughts of Sorts is a compilation of musings and essays attempting to circumscribe, in Perec’s words, “my experience of the world not in terms of the reflections it casts in distant places, but at its actual point of breaking surface.” Perec investigates the ways by which we define our place in the world, reveling in listmaking, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and at the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical / atypical Perec fashion.
Louis Begley
Franz Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head
Paperback $125
ISBN: 9781934633236 Published November 2009 (pre-order now!)
Kafkaesque: the very word evokes tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self-doubt, and an almost unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers. After Kafka, it can be said, literature was not the same. In the few novels and short stories he left behind, he distilled the horrors of the new age. Kafka’s is the voice of the outsider—that is, the voice of each one of us—at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone.
The product of both a transitional age (the beginning of the 20th century) and a territory in flux (Czechoslovakia), Kafka spoke and wrote German in Czech territory. He was a Jew among Christians, a non-observant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka’s life with sensitivity and insight. Begley’s discussion of Kafka’s masterpiece The Trial, along with shorter works such as “The Metamorphosis,” opens a window on a tormented soul, one of the most intriguing figures of the modern period.
aco on 14 Oct 2009 at 7:03 pm #
(a reader’s review by nin chan)
I keep thinking about this novel, even though it’s been about a month since I completed it. When I put it down, I knew that I had finished a great novel, a book that I found to be more accomplished even than Perec’s “W”, and certainly more moving than any of the other Oulipo experiments, but the more I meditate on it the more I am convinced that it is one of the great novels of the 20th century. By that I mean that I would class it alongside Ulysses, How It Is, Journey To The End Of The Night, As I Lay Dying, Hunger, Tropic Of Cancer, Time Regained, The Castle, Spring Snow, The Stranger, Nostromo, Lady Chatterley, Buddenbrooks, The Waves, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, etcetera etcetera. Somehow, it is everything that I wish One Hundred Years Of Solitude had been, though I feel the same way about another great novel I read shortly before L:aUM, Halldor Laxness’ sublime Independent People, which, for all of the cosmetic differences that distinguish it from Perec’s novel (it is about Icelandic sheep farmers, after all!) is a novel of comparable power, scope and tone. I’m not entirely sure why this is.
One of my principal complaints about Marquez’ book, and I have endeavored to enjoy it TWICE now, is that it is far too haphazard for my liking. At times, I feel as though I am reading a Borges ficcione multiplied a hundredfold- an experience I have had with Pamuk’s early material, mind you!- a kaleidoscopic whirligig that titillates initially, but exhausts the senses in short measure. I am aware that this complaint is often levied against the book, and for many it is one of the chief attractions of the novel. I love opulent writing as much as the next person, else I would not carry Leaves Of Grass around with me wherever I go, but for whatever reason I find the extravagant richness of Marquez’ writing to be off-putting in large amounts. Having read One Hundred Years Of Solitude another time, I am perhaps better prepared to make another audacious claim- that a few of the stories are not very interesting to begin with! Gratuitousness does not always make for quality, and sheer abundance does not always satisfy when the fare is not altogether palatable. This is not to say that One Hundred Years Of Solitude is not a good book. I marvel at certain passages- the civil war scenes are exquisitely wrought, being both incisive AND aesthetically satisfying (the bloodbath in the town square is one of the rare instances where I think the ‘magic realism’ has a truly palpable effect on the viscera). Still, it remains a befuddling book, dissatisfying on a few levels, not least of which is the philosophical one, but perhaps I need to read it a third time. While we’re on the subject of Marquez, I have a few things I’d like to say: Love In The Time Of Cholera is an adroit, mordant book, and not at all in the way that people think, Chronicle Of A Death Foretold is insufferably overrated, and Autumn of the Patriarch remains his masterpiece.
Pardon me for the lengthy excursus. Much brouhaha has been made about the famed concluding montage in L:aUM, and I do have to admit that I found it slightly underwhelming when I read it. It was a masterful conceit, but at the time I felt that Perec’s deadpan, laconic tone had, for once in the novel, frozen me out from reacting appropriately to it. There it was, doused in antiseptic and scoured clean of sentiment. The day after, I wept repeatedly as certain images kept resurfacing in my memory. To this day, I keep thinking about certain of my favorite anecdotes in the book- the couple that revived their love lives by engaging in high-risk felonies, the theosophic medium whose husband was AWOL from vietnam, the daughter who discovers her mother’s old photographs and weaves a fanciful genealogy for herself, the countryside chef who joins a travelling Moliere troupe before becoming a TV star in Hollywood. After Beckett, we all know that a novel fails, that it could not hope to encapsulate the cacophonous cornucopia of life. Perec is acutely aware of that, but he wants to contrive the most spectacular, the most poignant failure the novel has ever known. The entire novel is a dramatisation of that, is it not? Bartlebooth’s vainglorious agenda is the most beautiful tragicomedy in all of literature, more so than Don Quixote’s, than Phileas Fogg’s.
What I find even stranger about the book is Perec’s endeavor to craft a formally classical novel. True, the book owes a lot more to Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes and Chaucer than the ‘realist novel’ as such, but apart from some superficial traits it doesn’t have any of the formal brazenness of the new/anti-novel. For all of its unwieldy, unruly expansiveness- Perec is undoubtedly making a Borgesian statement with his endless spew of stories- the structure of L:aUM is more cohesive than one initially thinks, a fact that is made evident in the final scene. The preamble, repeated in the body of the story proper, is crucial to understanding the closing montage, and the cumulative effect is truly overwhelming. The entire novel is like a bulging, billowing balloon tied at both ends- the prolegomena and the coda impose some form upon the amorphous protoplasm. It is, I suppose, in this regard that the parallels to Ulysses are somewhat appropriate, though Ulysses is much, much, much more of a calculated product than this is, hardly a surprise, since Joyce, the last great Symbolist, is also the furthest thing from a Kafka, a Beckett or a Borges!