SOURCE: "Celebrations In a House of Fiction" in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4413, October 30-November 5, 1987, pp. 1191-92.

In the following review, Josipovici favorably reviews Life: A User's Manual, but finds fault with the English translation by David Bellows.

As with most major artists there is an exemplary quality about the life of Georges Perec: the contingent and the arbitrary have been transmuted into the resonant and meaningful. He was born in France in 1936 of immigrant Polish Jewish parents and was an orphan by the age of six, his father killed in 1940 fighting for his adopted country and his mother deported by the Nazis in 1943. Brought up by an aunt, he became in some ways more French than the French, as evidenced by the chord his first, rather modest novel, Les Choses (1965) seemed to strike in the public and critics alike. But after two further novels, one in the manner...