Perec's Life as Sub-Genre Exemplar

Thanks to the movie version of The Yacoubian Building (a Reading the World 2008 title) Chris Power has a short post in the Guardian about “Apartment Block Fiction”:

What better and more liberating way can there be for an author to explore such a wide range of characters and situations than the randomness of cheek-by-jowl domesticity – proximate but not necessarily intimate – which apartment living presents?

He lists some interesting examples, including Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille, Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Tenants of Moonbloom, and Glenn Patterson’s Number 5.

My personal favorite in this sub-genre is Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual:

The genre’s masterpiece, though, is Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which pores over the inhabitants of the fictional 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris. Perec freezes the block at the moment of death of one of its inhabitants. Then, moving through the grid of rooms in a knight’s move pattern (Perec was, after all, part of the Oulipo group, who enjoyed nothing more than a bit of creative masochism, like writing a novel without using the letter “e”), he explores the lives of the building’s occupants, past and present, and spans nearly 150 years in the process. As admired as it is by fans of literary puzzles, which infest the text, the novel is far more than an intellectual conundrum: it’s the Simon-Crubellier building itself that emerges as the main character, a vast storehouse of emotion and memory that asserts, for urbanites at least, the swarm of stories taking place around them every day.

There are others though, including Mati Unt’s The Autumn Ball, a very interesting book that was translated into English and published in Estonia years and years ago. Never actually published here, you can get a copy through most used book services—and it’s totally worth it. A perfect example of the “apartment block” sub-genre, Unt masterfully weaves together the lives and experiences of six different characters.