Some people won't read novels. I understand. I'm close to not wanting to read novels myself: they're trying, and often seem the same. But one thing all fiction guarantees is that it will describe a place that doesn't exist: ideally, a place that bears some relation to the world you think you know but is larger, stranger, bolder and more promising. The rest - stories that never happened, about people who never existed - is immaterial. What is for me the most memorable novel of the last fifty years, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, is endlessly valuable because of its infinite promise: Perec invented a Parisian apartment block and bisected it, as if it were a doll's house, to describe lives that might have been lived in every one of its hundred rooms. The book's construction depends on an elaborate pattern, but its central brilliance is trick-free: Paris, 1975, a particular building with cellars and garrets and stairways and salons and endless particular clutter.

LRB 9 March 2006 | PDF Download