This book is sprawling, encyclopedic, full of lists, and wonderful. It’s the story of the life of a Paris apartment building, but seen with the focus of an elderly inhabitant, the painter Valène, who’s decided he wants to make a painting of the building and the people who live in it. The opening epigraphs, by Paul Klee and Jules Verne, situate the book immediately in the visual realm. (Verne: “Look with all your eyes, look.”) It’s structured, mostly, as a room-by-room inventory, visual detail, but with the stories of the lives of the people who live in each apartment, or who used to live in each apartment, ghosting behind the things. (It’s like the doll’s house in one resident’s apartment, “all reproduced almost microscopically with manic accuracy.”) (p 99) Each of the mostly short chapters is situated in one apartment or another (or on the stairs, or in the cellars): it’s a pleasing conceit, the path the narrative takes, starting on the stairs then moving up in a spiral: 2nd floor right, 3rd floor right, 4th floor right, 5th floor right. (Two chapters are lists devoted to a “draft inventory of some of the things found on the stairs over the years,” the little bits of odd refuse that are part of city life, always; contained within a building, they speak to the unknown and unknowable in the building’s life, objects that are part of the narrative without having a clear place.)
One of the main preoccupations of the book is puzzles, which show up throughout the text: the jigsaw puzzles that Gaspard Winckler, one resident, carves, or the word puzzles that another resident solves. There is, along with the puzzles, a sense of play, strangeness, a looking-glass world. One character, Madame Trévins, has written a novel that, though nominally about her (fictional) quintuplet nieces, is really about the inhabitants of the house: “A closer reading of these imaginary lives would no doubt lead to discovering the key […]” — fictionalized, transposed: a novel of the life of the building in a novel of the life of the building about a vision of the painting of the life of the building (p 451). Reflections like this appear in objects in the text as well, for example the boxes of whisky which show men carrying the boxes of whisky, a scene repeated on smaller and smaller boxes ad infinitum. (There are other fictions within fictions, too: Véra Orlova singing an aria from “Orlando” by Arconati, which was itself made up by Jules Verne in Le Château des Carpathes.)
Though the novel is about the building as a whole, one of the most ineresting stories is that of Bartlebooth, a rich man who has chosen a curious life’s project. He decides to learn to paint, and then to paint 500 watercolors in 500 different ports. Upon painting each piece, he sends it back to Paris, where Gaspard Winckler makes it into a jigsaw puzzle. Later, when Bartlebooth is done with his travels, he plans to put each puzzle together again, then have it separated again into paper and wood, then returned to the spot where it was painted, where the paint will be chemically erased, leaving only a clean sheet of paper: a project with no traces except his own memory. The descriptions of the ports (pp 52-53) is a paragraph-long list-sentence, wonderfully full.
The novel as a whole is also incredibly allusive—there are snippets of Rabelais, Joycean words, whole scenes that seem homages to bits of Ulysses, a passage on scale models of weapons that’s from Tristram Shandy, and who knows how many other references I missed (see also: Paul Auster’s review in the New York Times).
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