Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman
Jo Applin · Art Journal · 2008
Georges Perec's epic novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual) opens with a preamble about the “art of jigsaw puzzles” in which he documents the peculiarities of the process of assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of keeping in mind the finished image when putting the puzzle together, connecting the parts to the whole, one must negotiate a series of part-to-part relationships in which “the only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces.” The jigsaw pieces, Perec continues, “are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing—just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.”1 The mode of making Perec invokes here, in which the bigger picture makes sense only through careful attention to the piecemeal and fragmented puzzle pieces, is a small, playful entry in his own bigger picture, a novel composed of short vignettes that narrate the story of a Parisian apartment block.