Life, user tutorial

One of the great novels of the 20th century is La vie: mode d'emploi by Georges Perec, for which the French author won the Médicis Prize in 1978. Perec imagines a ten-story building, including the attic and the basement, at number 11, a fictional rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, and sets about narrating the stories of its tenants in the narrative present (June 23, 1975) and the building's past, in a 99-chapter puzzle composed from various hidden conditions, the famous obstacles ( contraintes ) of the Oulipo group, of which Perec was a prominent member. Now Proa has just reissued the award-winning Catalan translation published by Ramon Lladó and Annie Bats in 1998 ( La vida manual d'ús ).

Tomorrow and Monday, there will be 28 hours of continuous reading of 'La vie: mode d'emploi'.

There are novels, such as Joyce's Ulysses , that concentrate their action in a single day, which its readers commemorate with joy. Taking Joyce's Bloomsday (June 16) as a model, Perec writers Kim Nguyen and Enric Parellada have organized a continuous reading aloud of the complete text of this magnum opus. Nguyen is the author of Why Georges Perec (La uÑa RoTa, 2024), and Parellada has published surprising stories, including those in the still-unpublished collection L'aberració (Llibre de contines) .

Taking advantage of the 50th anniversary of this narrative, 101 readers will be visiting the Calders Bookstore in Barcelona in an orderly fashion to read the 99 chapters of the novel, plus the prologue and epilogue, in the version each reader prefers: the original French, the Catalan translation by Lladó & Bats, the Spanish translation by Josep Escué for Anagrama, or any other.

The continuous reading will take place tomorrow, Sunday the 22nd, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., and on Monday the 23rd from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., which is the date of the death of the enigmatic Percival Bartlebooth.

The novel's wealthy protagonist forges an extraordinary life plan based on the search for landscapes, all over the world, worthy of being immortalized in a watercolor that a specialist then transforms into puzzles, with the intention that the painter spend his old age reconstructing the landscapes he visited in his youth.

Between the first words of the bookseller Isabel Sucunza, who will precede Adrià Pujol Cruells, and the last words of a secret reader who will arrive, after Kim Nguyen, at the exact time of Bartlebooth's death, exactly 28 hours of reading aloud will have passed.

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Half a century ago, Georges Perec titled his great novel after the printed instruction manuals that often came with every household appliance. Today, that type of literature has evolved into YouTube tutorials, video podcasts, and Instagram stories. It's only fitting, then, that Perec's work makes the leap into the audiovisual reality of life.