Episode 1: David Bellos on 'Life a User Manual' and George Perec

This week I’m excited to publish the first episode of The Library of Babel podcast. Each episode will talk with a scholar, a translator or an author about a literary work we both love. The first episode sets the bar pretty high, because for today we have with us Prof. David Bellos, the translator and biographer, for a talk about the works of the author George Perec. Hope you enjoy.

Two years before publishing his greatest novel Life: a User’s Manual, the book that put this author’s name on the literary map of the world, George Perec published a shorter work but no less amazing.

The book is titled Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and in it, Perec moves through different spaces in the world – the human world. From the page to the room, the apartment to the floor and the building, the street to the neighborhood, and from the city to the world and universe. In each space Perec lingers, observes, and describes the surface. He does so because he believes that only there – on the surface of things - and not in some hidden secret or an undeciphered code, the truth of world lies.

In one of the chapters of this book – Perec describes a plan for a novel he’s been working on, which would later become Life: a User’s Manual:

Project for a novel

I imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed – so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible.

The novel – whose title is Life: a User’s Manual – restricts itself (If I dare use that verb for a project that will finally extend to something like four hundred pages) to describing the rooms thus unveiled and the activities unfolding in them, the whole in accordance with formal procedures which it doesn’t seem necessary to go into in detail here.

So to talk about his wonderful book, I’ve invited Professor David Bellos, who among other things wrote the equally wonderful biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words.

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