Talk:Life: A User's Manual

Untitled
Just a quick note on the section entitled "The Novel". Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246: "Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile." I also agree that much more could be done on this entry. While it's obviously pretty hard to explain a lot of this stuff, I really don't think we've managed to capture yet what is so great about the novel. I might have a go at some point. We'll have to see if I can find the time. James

Expansion
Just a quick note on the section entitled "The Novel." Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246 in Bellos' translation: "Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile." For what it's worth, I also agree that this entry needs an update. While it's obviously very hard to do justice to a novel like this here, I think we can do better. I'll see if I can find the time to have a go at some point. James

Doesn't look like anyone has been working intently on this page in awhile. I'd like to expand it some more, some of the sections are quite good, but some are rather short and perhaps a little too brief for those who have not actually read the novel. I also think the page coul possibly use to be reorganized a little bit -- perhaps find some way to integrate the "novel" section with the "elements" section? Any suggestions?JKillah 15:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Capitalization police please note: "La Vie mode d'emploi" is exactly how the title appears in both of my copies. :-) -- user:Tarquin

Proper names of things like books need to have the capitalization the the author of the book placed on his/her book. This is a noted exception to the capitalization rule. However, my searches indicate that the title is sometimes expressed with a lowercase "v", as in, La vie mode d'emploi. But since the capitalization is correct, in this case, I think a redirect is in order from the lowercase term to the properly capitalized term. Thank you for noting the correct capitalization here - It would bave been difficult for me to find this out by trying to translate those search results. --maveric149

I don't want to trespass too much on matters about which others know more than I, but ... Am I right in thinking that the construction of the apartment block is in fact a graeco-latin square of order 10? The interesting thing here is that Leonhard Euler had believed that no such array existed but it was constructed by computer search in 1959. Cutler 11:18, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * yes, that's right. I wrote "double Latin square" because I wasn't sure of the English translation. -- Tarquin 10:54, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Today I added a section on the word puzzles contained in the novel, along with some specifics on the Chapter 51 puzzle with a quote from David Bellos he shared with me via email.

There's no ":" in the title of the English translation... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.136.113.236 (talk) 19:01, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed- the full title in English, reflecting the French original, is 'Life A User's Manual' but I can't work out how to Edit the title of this page (can it be done?). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.191.228.106 (talk) 08:26, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Three questions
1. Why is the cross section on p. 501 of the English translation drawn incorrectly? It looks like a 10x9, not 10x10 square (shouldn't the rooms of Hutting, Cinoc, Réol, and Berger drawn wider?)

2. In chapter 51 the list of 179 stories has the word "ego" embedded in them — why is that? Incidentally, the translator's skill on display there is simply astonishing.

3. The mathematics on p. 7 has errors in it and is also a typographic disaster zone. Is the French original similarly bad? Seems like Perec would be the type of man to make sure the thing is as accurate as possible. In the English version everything looks wrong: the spacing, the typeface, the misunderstood math symbols, missing parentheses, etc. etc. JanBielawski (talk) 06:39, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Ewart7034 18:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

An issue with the article
The passage La Vie mode d'emploi is an immensely complex and rich work; a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas and literary and historical allusions seems in breach of WP:EDITORIAL and WP:NPOV.Autarch (talk) 12:42, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree "tapestry" sounds promotional and removed it. The rest sounds neutral enough to me? the book contains many stories, woven together in the sense that the narration moves back and forth between them, and it contains many ideas and allusions. --a3nm (talk) 12:03, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone know the answer?
On page 415 (English translation) we are given four riddles with no answers:

(1) Who was John Leland's friend? (Thomas Wyatt; this answer can be found in the book's index!) (2) Who was threatened by a railway-share? (The Snark in The Hunting of the Snark) (3) Who was Sheraton? (Thomas Sheraton) (4) Who shaved the old man's beard?

Does anyone know the answer to this fourth riddle? 91.105.31.153 (talk) 00:34, 25 December 2010 (UTC)


 * This question is so old that the asker might well by now either have learned the answer or ceased to care, but I believe that the reference is to the 1962 novel The Conversions by Harry Mathews, in which "Who shaved the old man's beard?" is one of the three mysterious questions the protagonist must answer in order to secure his inheritance. Mathews was involved with Oulipo so Perec would certainly have been familiar. If I recall correctly, we do not learn the answer to the riddle (or whether there even is an answer) by the novel's end. 81.101.21.84 (talk) 20:29, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Constraints
The section entitled constraints isn't at all well explained - the part about the lists and how they match up is very confused. It either needs rewording, or an illustraive diagram needs to be added. Also references for this section? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.200.144.132 (talk) 08:51, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

The missing colon in "Life A User's Manual"
The image shown on the main page has the colon, implicitly. The line break is the colon.

If there were really no colon there, then the title would have been written: Life A User's Manual The British Library has 2 records for this book: Life : a user's manual / edited by John Miller with Eliza Finkelstein Life, a user's manual : fictions / Georges Perec ; translated from the French by David Bellos I see ^^^^^ punctuation here. Don't you?

Restore the deleted colon. Varlaam (talk) 04:34, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree; the article ought to be moved back to Life: A User's Manual where it was created and stayed until 28 October 2011. It's the book's commonly used title. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:32, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

David Bellos' biography of Perec renders the title colonless, as do the translations of Perec's writings in the Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Perec's friend and collaborator Harry Mathews. It seems fair to assume Perec's intended title is colonless. [Anonymous User, 21/02/2017]


 * Following on from the previous comment about The Oulipo Compendium:

The two references in the British library both plainly contradict the titles of the books involved, as clearly printed on both their covers and their title pages (one of which books is not the novel but a collection of essays about the novel). Bellos' translation (the only one in English) omits the colon both in the original translation and in his revised edition made after "20 years of re-reading." And, of course, inserting the colon is completely unjustified based on the French title, published in the author's lifetime.

But what do the author, the English translator, the author's English collaborator, the editor of the single collection of essays devoted to the novel, and the publishers of all of these books know? And that's ignoring that this violates Perec's obvious intent in playing with language.

The justification that the formatting of the cover of the English edition uses a new grammatical tool - the 'implicit comma' - isn't supported by the current edition (in print since 2009) which has The title on one line: "Life a user's manual."

The colon should go. 99.243.127.101 (talk) 16:09, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 3 August 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved. No objections and seems fair enough. It's found with a colon in some places, e.g. Amazon, and although many other sources don't have a colon, but equally they don't have a lower-case "a" either, so the current title isn't really any good. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 18:06, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Life a User's Manual → Life: A User's Manual – Per MOS:TITLES and the typical way this is rendered in English (exact styling varies: Life: A User's Manual, Life: a User's Manual, Life, a User's Manual, Life – A User's Manual, etc.), but it's clearly treated as a subtitle. There are also occurrence of just Life a User's Manual, but they're not even faintly close to a consistent style employed across the majority of RS, so we have no reason to depart from MOS:TITLES; there is no WP:IAR case to make here. The current page title is ungrammatical and confusing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:56, 3 August 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.


 * Since the claim is that using the colon is the "typical" way the title is rendered in English, some evidence of that "typical" use should be provided. Since the title of both editions of the English translation and the book of essays devoted to the novel all omit the colon, I'm not clear what "typical" means in this case. 2607:FEA8:295E:4400:4BD:670A:A31D:A3A4 (talk) 17:17, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Reception
Donald Knuth’s evaluation of the novel is of no significance whatsoever. 94.173.211.41 (talk) 20:41, 24 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I tend to agree, and removed the sentence in question. a3nm (talk) 12:05, 19 December 2023 (UTC)