Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec Read Free Book Online Page A

his African adventure. The novel appeared in 1932, under the title African Gold , published by Les Editions du Tonneau. The one critic who reviewed it compared it to Journey to the End of the Night , which had appeared at about the same time.
    The novel was not much read, but it allowed Rorschach to get into literary society. A few months later he founded a review which he entitled, rather bizarrely, Prejudices , thereby wishing no doubt to signify that the review had none. It appeared at a rhythm of four issues a year up until the war. It published several pieces by some authors who subsequently established themselves. Though Rorschach is very close with precise details on this point, it seems probable that it was a vanity-publishing enterprise. In any case, of all his pre-war projects it is the only one he does not describe as a total failure.
    Some say that he spent his war with the Free French Army, and that he was entrusted with several missions of a diplomatic nature. Others assert, to the contrary, that he collaborated with the Axis powers and that after the war he had to flee to Spain. What’s certain is that he returned to France, rich and flourishing, and even married, in the early sixties. It was at a time when, as he recalls jokingly, all you had to do to be a producer was to set up in one of the innumerable empty offices in the Maison de la Radio , and he began to work for television. It was also at this time that he bought from Olivier Gratiolet the last two apartments in the building still owned by him, apart from the little flat he lived in himself. Rorschach had them knocked into a single, prestigious duplex which was photographed many times for La Maison Française, Maison et Jardin, Forum, Art et Architecture Aujourd’hui , and other specialist reviews.
    Valène can still remember the first time he saw him. It was one of those days when (so as not to cause a surprise) the lift was out of order. He had come out of his flat and was on his way downstairs to see Winckler, and passed in front of the newcomer’s door. It was wide open. Workmen were coming and going, and in the lobby Rorschach was scratching his head as he listened to the advice of his interior designer. At that time he’d gone for the American look, with floral shirts, neckerchiefs, and wristbands. Later he went in for the weary lion look, the old loner who’s seen it all, happier with desert Bedouins than in the drawing rooms of Paris: canvas rubbers, leather jerkins, grey linen shirts.
    Today he is an ill old man, forced to spend most of his time in nursing homes or in long-drawn-out convalescence. His misanthropy remains as proverbial as ever, but has a diminishing field for expression.
    BIBLIOGRAPHY
RORSCHACH, R.
   
Memories of a Struggler . Paris, Gallimard, 1974.
RORSCHACH, R.
   
African Gold . Paris, Ed. du Tonneau, 1932.
Gen. A. COSTELLO
   
“Could the Schlendrian Offensive have saved Sedan?”, Army Hist. Review , 7,1907.
LANDES, D.
   
“The Cauri System and African Banking”, Harvard J. Econ ., 48,1965.
ZGHAL, A.
   
“Les Systèmes d’échanges interafricains. Mythes et réalités”, Zeitschrift für Ethnol ., 194, 1971.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     

Dinteville, 1
     
    DR DINTEVILLE’S CONSULTING room: an examining couch, a metal desk, almost bare, with only a telephone, an anglepoise lamp, a prescription pad, a matt-finished steel pen in the groove of a marble inkstand; a small yellow leather divan, above which hangs a large reproduction of a Vasarely, two broad and sprouting succulents rising out of plaited raffia pot-holders, one on each side of the window; a set of freestanding shelves, the top shelf supporting a number of instruments, a stethoscope, a chrome-plated cotton-wool dispenser, a small bottle of medicinal alcohol; and along the whole right-hand wall, shining metal panels concealing various pieces of medical apparatus and the cupboards where the doctor keeps his instruments, his records, and his