I put this novel in a category with Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, and D'Arconville's Cat: big, ambitious, experimental novels that attempt to catalog the entirety of human endeavor in a single story. They are novels that I admire but do not really enjoy.
In the case of Life: A User's Manual, the jumping off point is an apartment building in Paris. Each chapter describes the contents of one of the rooms in fastidious detail. Objects in the room — be they art works or knickknacks belonging to the occupants — lead to digressions and stories that carry us far afield in time and space. Periodically, repeated details made the chapters seem like puzzle pieces that fit together.
I was intrigued by the story of Bartlebooth, which occupied a central place in the story and seemed to be a key to the interpretation of the whole. Bartlebooth devises a life plan for himself. He spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors; for the next twenty years he travels to sea ports around the world and paints a watercolor at each one. He sends the watercolors to a friend, who makes them into 750 piece jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth spends the next 20 years reconstructing the puzzles, after which he has them reconstituted as watercolors and sent back to the place they were painted with intructions to dissolve the paints and return to blank paper.
I found the author's voice to be too static (even when telling shaggy dog stories) and the various catalogs to be too long. I was not engaged enough to pull the many digressions into a coherent piece of art.
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