ABSTRACT
Life: A User's Manual is Georges Perec undisputed masterwork, for many French readers Perec is above all the author of Je me souviens (1978), an oft-imitated series of 480 sentences each beginning "I remember" and recalling "nearly forgotten, inessential and banal memories". The teeming quality of Life: A User's Manual emerges from a massive, pre-ordained "elimination"; unbelievably strict constraints proscribe countless lexical and fictional possibilities. The originality of Perec's project in Life: A User's Manual becomes clear. "One must radically and explicitly dissociate", write the editors in their preface, "the rules guiding the production and construction of this novel from what might be considered the 'natural' inner laws of the fiction that is recounted". In Life: A User's Manual, the ultimate emotion can perhaps best be described as metaphysical: an overwhelming feeling of emptiness, of the void, which results when all the artifice behind the fiction is suddenly exposed.
