Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
One day, I’ll finally read Perec’s A Void the novel without an “e”, as well as his novella Les Revenentes the short story that only uses “e”. I have both hiding in my garage, buried in one of my many boxes.
In the meantime, I can vouch for Perec’s magisterial work, Life a User’s Manual. One of my favorite memories of my semester in Paris was reading that book in a park on a gorgeous spring afternoon.
But don’t take my word for it.
In my view, this book, published in Paris in 1978, four years before the author died at the early age of forty-six, is the last real “event in the history of the novel so far. There are many reasons for this: the plan of the book, the incredible scope but at the same time solidly finished; the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of “today” that is made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void; the continual presence of anguish and irony together – in a word, the manner in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.
“Multiplicity”, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino, 1985