George Perec- La vie mode d'emploi (1976)

"The facade is removed from a Parisian apartment house on the Rue Simon-Crubellier, permitting us to spy on its tenants in the grid of rooms and to examine their pictures and bibelots. Books, letters, clippings and announcements add to the textual welter, all interlocking like pieces of a puzzle, the novel's chief metaphor. Tales told in stylishly reinvented genresromance, detection, adventureconstitute what is experienced, read about or dreamed up by an array of restaurateurs, mediums, cyclists, antique dealers and pious widows. A quester for the Nile tries to rescue a beautiful German girl from a harem. [...] This is a classic of contemporary fiction."

"Represents an exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality as seen through the eyes of the dying Serge Valene, an inhabitant of a large Parisian apartment block."