Life: A User's Manual
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(Redirected from Bartlebooth)Life A User's Manual
Cover of English translation
Author Georges Perec
Original title 'La Vie mode d'emploi'
Translator David Bellos
Country France
Language French
Publisher Hachette Littératures
Publication date 1978
Published in
English 1987
ISBN ISBN 0879237511 (1987 hardcover)
ISBN 1567923739 (2008 paperback)
Life A User's Manual (the original title is La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, though Perec himself preferred to avoid labels and his only long term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.
La Vie mode d'emploi is an immensely complex and rich work; a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas and literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block, 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier (no such street exists, however, the quadrangle Perec claims Simon-Crubellier cuts through does exist in Paris XVII). It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity:Contents [hide]
1 Elements
1.1 Bartlebooth
1.2 Apartment block
1.3 The Knight's Tour
2 The Constraints
3 The novel
4 Reading
5 See Also
6 External links
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Elements
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Bartlebooth
...the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach ... [it] would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversely controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it.
This is a story imagined by Perec when working on a large jigsaw puzzle, and is briefly this:
Between World War I and II, a tremendously wealthy Englishman, Bartlebooth (whose name combines two literary characters, Herman Melville's Bartleby and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth), devises a plan that will both occupy the remainder of his life and spend his entire fortune. First, he spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors under the tutelage of Valene, who also becomes a resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Then, he embarks on a 20-year trip around the world with his loyal servant Smautf (also a resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier), painting a watercolor of a different port roughly every two weeks for a total of 500 watercolors.
Bartlebooth then sends each painting back to France, where the paper is glued to a support board, and a carefully selected craftsman named Gaspard Winckler (also a resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier) cuts it into a jigsaw puzzle. Upon his return, Bartlebooth spends his time solving each jigsaw, re-creating the scene.
Each finished puzzle is treated to re-bind the paper with a special solution invented by Georges Morellet, another resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. After the solution is applied, the wooden support is removed, and the painting is sent to the port where it was painted. Exactly 20 years to the day after it was painted, the painting is placed in the seawater until the colors dissolve, and the paper, blank except for the faint marks where it was cut and re-joined, is returned to Bartlebooth.
Ultimately, there would be nothing to show for 50 years of work: the project would leave absolutely no mark on the world. Unfortunately for Bartlebooth, Winckler's puzzles become increasingly difficult and Bartlebooth himself becomes blind. A crazed art fanatic also intervenes in an attempt to stop Bartlebooth from destroying his art. By 1975, Bartlebooth is 16 months behind in his plans, and he dies while working on his 439th puzzle.
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Apartment block
One of Perec's long-standing projects was the description of a Parisian apartment block, as it could be seen if the entire facade would be removed, exposing every room. Some illustrious precedents of this theme can be tracked to The crippled devil (1641) by the Spanish Luis Vélez de Guevara (partially adapted to 18th century France by Lesage's Diable boiteux) and The Master and Margarita by the Russian Mikhail Bulgakov. Another well-known literary puzzle is Hopscotch by the Paris-resident Argentinian Julio Cortázar. Perec was obsessed with lists: such a description would be exhaustive down to the last detail.
While Bartlebooth's puzzle narrative is the central story of the book, 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant.
The narrative moves like a Knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to them.) In each room we learn about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about someone they have come into contact with.
Many of the characters at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, such as Smautf, Valene, Winckler, and Morellet have a direct connection to Bartlebooth's quest. Thus, in those rooms the Bartlebooth puzzle-narrative tends to be carried further. Many of the narratives, however, are linked to Bartlebooth only by being related to the history of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.
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The Knight's Tour
A Knight's Tour as a means of generating a novel was a long-standing idea of the Oulipo group. Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10*10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics and 10 rooms across, including 2 for the stairwell. Each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight's moves on the grid.
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The Constraints
These elements come together with Perec's constraints for the book (in keeping with Oulipo objectives): he created a complex system which would generate for each chapter a list of items, references or objects which that chapter should then contain or allude to. He described this system as a "machine for inspiring stories".
There are 42 lists of 10 objects each, gathered into 10 groups of 4 with the last two lists a special "Couples" list. Some examples:
number of people involved
length of the chapter in pages
an activity
a position of the body
emotions
an animal
reading material
countries
2 lists of novelists, from whom a literary quotation is required
"Couples", e.g. Pride and Prejudice, Laurel and Hardy.
The way in which these apply to each chapter is governed by an array called a Graeco-Latin square. The lists are considered in pairs, and each pair is governed by one cell of the array, which guarantees that every combination of elements is encountered. For instance, the items in the couples list are seen once with their natural partner (in which case Perec gives an explicit reference), and once with every other element (where he is free to be cryptic). In the 1780s, the great mathematician Leonhard Euler had conjectured that a 10*10 Graeco-Latin square could not exist and it was not until 1959 that one was actually constructed, refuting Euler.
To further complicate matters, the 38th and 39th list are named "Missing" and "False" and each list comprises the numbers 1 to 10. The number these lists give for each chapter indicates one of the 10 groups of 4 lists, and folds the system back on itself: one of the elements must be omitted, and one must be false in some way (an opposite, for example). Things become tricky when the Missing and False numbers refer to group 10, which includes the Missing and False lists.
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The novel
The entire block is primarily presented frozen in time, on June 23, 1975 just before 8pm, moments after the death of Bartlebooth. Nonetheless, the constraints system creates hundreds of separate stories encountered in the different rooms, concerning inhabitants of the block past and present and the other people in their lives. The story of Bartlebooth is the principal thread, but it interlinks with many others, for example his love for Marguerite Winckler, the wife of the jigsaw-puzzle maker, for which (he believes), Winckler is punishing him with puzzles of increasing complexity.
Bartlebooth's failing sight and the fiendishness of the puzzles increasingly steer his plan off course. Furthermore, several collectors of unique or eccentric artifacts choose his paintings as targets to acquire, and he is forced to change his plans and have the watercolors burned in a furnace locally instead of couriered back to the sea, for fear of those involved in the task being bribed.
Another key thread is the painter Serge Valene's final project. Bartlebooth hires him as a tutor before embarking on his tour of the world, and buys him a flat in the block. He is one of several painters who have lived in the block over the century. He plans to paint the entire apartment block, seen in elevation with the facade removed, showing all the occupants and the details of their lives: Valene, a character in the novel seeks to create a representation of the novel as a painting. Chapter 51, falling in the middle of the book lists all of Valene's ideas, and in the process picks out the key stories seen so far and yet to come.
Both Bartlebooth and Valene fail in their projects: this is a recurring theme in many of the stories.
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Reading
While the book can be read linearly, from start to finish, it can be just as enjoyable to dip in and out of: for this purpose, an appendix section contains a chronology of events starting at 1833, a 70-page index, a list of the 100 or so main stories, and a plan of the elevation of the block as the 10x10 grid. The index lists many of the people, places and works of art mentioned in the book:
real, such as Mozart
fictitious, such as Jules Verne's character Captain Nemo
internally real, such as Bartlebooth himself
internally fictitious: the characters in a story written by a schoolboy, for instance
Haruki Murakami
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Haruki murakami)Haruki Murakami
Murakami giving a lecture at MIT in 2005.
Born January 12, 1949 (age 59)
Kyoto, Japan
Occupation Author, Novelist
Nationality Japanese
Genres Fiction, Surrealist, Postmodern
Notable work(s) Norwegian Wood
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Kafka on the Shore
Official website
Haruki Murakami (???? Murakami Haruki?, born January 12, 1949) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator.[1] His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex".Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 "Trilogy of the Rat"
1.2 Wider recognition
1.3 An established novelist
1.4 Recent work
2 Criticism and influence
3 Films and other adaptations
4 Bibliography
4.1 Novels
4.2 Short stories
4.3 Other Work
5 Translators of Murakami's works
6 References
7 External links
7.1 Interviews
[edit]
Biography
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe.[2] His father was the son of a Buddhist priest.[3] His mother was the daughter of an Osaka merchant.[citation needed] Both taught Japanese literature.[4]
Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his Western influences.[5]
Murakami studied theater arts at Waseda University in Tokyo.[6] His first job was in a record store (which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works). Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse (jazz bar, in the evening) "Peter Cat" in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife, Yoko.[7] They ran the bar from 1974 until 1982.[citation needed] Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to classical music, for example, the three books comprising The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's orchestral overture), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann), and The Bird-Catcher (a protagonist in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (from The Beach Boys), Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).[8]
Murakami is a keen marathon runner and triathlete, although he did not start running until the age of 33. On June 23, 1996, Murakami completed his first and only "ultramarathon" — a 100 km race around Lake Saroma, Hokkaido, Japan.[9]
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"Trilogy of the Rat"
Murakami wrote his first fiction when he was 29.[10] He said he was suddenly and inexplicably inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) while watching a baseball game.[11] In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to an oft-repeated story, in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized he could write a novel.[12] He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on it for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar (resulting in a fragmented, jumpy text in short chapters). After finishing, he sent his novel to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, and won first prize. Even in this first work, many of the basic elements of Murakami's mature writing are in place: Westernized style, idiosyncratic humor, and poignant nostalgia.
His initial success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to keep writing. A year later he published Pinball, 1973, a sequel. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success, which makes original use of fantastic elements and has a uniquely disconnected plot. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the "Trilogy of the Rat" (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was written later but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend, "the Rat". However, the first two novels are unpublished in English translation outside Japan, where an English edition with extensive translation notes was published as part of a series intended for English students. According to Murakami (Publishers Weekly, 1991), he considers his first two novels "weak", and was not eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase was "The first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."
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Wider recognition
In 1985 Murakami wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dreamlike fantasy which takes the magical elements in his work to a new extreme.
Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among Japanese youth, making Murakami something of a superstar in his native country (to his dismay). The book was printed in two separate volumes, sold together, so that the number of books sold was actually doubled, since the entire book was released in two separate books, creating the million-copy bestseller hype. One book had a green cover, the other a red one. In 1986, Murakami left Japan, traveled throughout Europe, and settled in the United States.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1992), 1999 Vintage paperback edition
Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.[2] During this time he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.[2]
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An established novelist
In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This novel fuses his realistic and fantastic tendencies, and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of war crimes in Manchuria (Manchukuo). The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is frequently cited by critics as Murakami's best work.[citation needed] It won him the Yomiuri Prize, awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.[13]
The processing of collective trauma soon took a central position in Murakami's writing, which had until then been more personal in nature. While he was finishing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japan was shaken by the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, in the aftermath of which he returned to Japan. He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection after the quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system. While perpetrators and events behind the attack are not the focus of the book, the picture of Japanese society that Murakami paints is shocking.
English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. He has also translated many of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.[2]
In 2006, Murakami became the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic for his novel Umibe no Kafka (Kafka on the Shore).[14] Murakami told reporters, "In a way, reading Franz Kafka's works served as a starting point for me as a novelist."[citation needed]
In September 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège,[15] as well as one from Princeton University in June 2008.[16]
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Recent work
The succinct Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999. Kafka on the Shore was published in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. The English version of his latest novel, After Dark, was released in May 2007. It was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year. In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled To¯kyo¯ Kitanshu¯ (?????, translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo"). A collection of the English versions of 24 short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's most recent short stories (including all five that appear in To¯kyo¯ Kitanshu¯).
Murakami has recently published an anthology called Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a specially written story by Murakami himself.
A new book of essays titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, featuring tales about his experience as a full marathon runner and a triathlete, has been published in Japan,[17] with English translations released in the U.K. and the U.S. This title is a play on that of Raymond Carver's collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
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Criticism and influence
Murakami's fiction, often criticized for being "pop" literature by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time digresses on themes of alienation, loneliness, and longing for love. Through his work, he was able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and explore the negative effects of Japan's work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decrease in human values and a loss of connection between people in Japan's society.
Murakami was awarded the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman but, according to the Kiriyama Official Website, Murakami "declined to accept the award for reasons of personal principle".[18]
Murakami was mistakenly congratulated for receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 on the homepage of a city library in his native Ashiya, but this was the library's error.[13]
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Films and other adaptations
Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no uta o kike) was adapted by Japanese director Kazuki O¯mori. The film was released in 1981 and distributed by Art Theatre Guild.[19]
Naoto Yamakawa directed two short films Attack on the Bakery (released in 1982) and A Girl, She is 100 Percent (released in 1983) , based on Murakami's short stories Attack on the Bakery and On Seeing the 100% Perfect Woman One Beautiful April Morning respectively.[20]
Japanese director Jun Ichikawa has adapted Murakami's short story Tony Takitani into a 75 minute feature.[21] The film has played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles on July 29, 2005. The original short story (as translated by Jay Rubin) is available in the April 15, 2002, issue of The New Yorker, as a stand-alone book published by Cloverfield Press, and part of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Knopf.
In 1998 the German film Der Eisbaer (Polar Bear), written and directed by Granz Henman, used elements of Murakami's short story The Second Bakery Attack in its three intersecting story lines.
Murakami's work has also been adapted for the stage, in a 2003 play entitled The Elephant Vanishes, co-produced by Britain's Complicite company and Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre. The production, directed by Simon McBurney, adapted three of Murakami's short stories and received acclaim for its unique blending of multimedia (video, music, and innovative sound design) with actor-driven physical theatre (mime, dance, and even acrobatic wirework).[22] On tour, the play was performed in Japanese, with translating supertitles for European and American audiences.
Two stories from Murakami's book after the quake—Honey Pie and Superfrog Saves Tokyo— have been adapted for the stage and directed by Frank Galati. Entitled after the quake, the play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in association with La Jolla Playhouse, and opened October 12, 2007 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.[23] In 2008 Galati adapted and directed a theatrical version of Kafka on the Shore also first running at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater from September to November.[24]
On Max Richter's 2006 album Songs from Before, Robert Wyatt reads passages from Murakami's novels.
In 2007, Robert Logevall adapted All God's Children Can Dance into a film, with a specially composed soundtrack by American jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9.
In 2008, Tom Flint adapted On Seeing the 100% Perfect Woman One Beautiful April Morning into a short film. The film was screened at the 2008 CON-CAN Movie Festival. The film can be viewed, voted, and commented upon as part of the Audience award for the movie festival.[25]
It was announced in July 2008 that French-Vietnamese film-maker Tran Anh Hung would direct an adaptation of Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood. The film will be released in 2010.[26]
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