This is one of the great books of the twentieth century and is worth learning French for. It's a jigsaw puzzle and a massive painting. It's an Oulipean conundrum and a microcosm of the world. It's a clever game and a philosophical investigation. It's all the things that literature should be and, in particular, it shows that, in the end, life does not fit together in a nice, neat pattern.
Perec himself said he saw a Paris block of flats with the front stripped off so that you could peer into all of the flats and watch the inhabitants go about their daily business. And, to a great extent, that is what this novel is about. He takes a (fictitious) block of flats at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier and looks at each flat, in seemingly random order (though he uses, like Nabokov, the move of a knight in chess to move through the flats), and their inhabitants, 179 in all. The story is told by Serge Valène, who has lived in the building for fifty-five years and who is a painter who, towards the end of his life, plans on creating a painting summing up all of his life (which, of course, he does not complete).
(Source: http://www.themodernnovel.com/french/perec/vie.htm)
