At the very center of the book is a fictitious ten-story condominium in Paris, which may be found at 11 Rue Simon Crubellier. The address, which Perec conjures up in the 17th arrondissement, is a fictional creation too.
Ten rooms per floor make a square of 100 components so one can see them all at once.
Perec himself made use of a schematic picture of the structure as he wrote, to verify each room's location in the actual palace construction and the narrative's virtual world.
Chapter by chapter, the author methodically takes his reader through the entire building from its entryway through the stately first-floor suites all the way up into the small apartments (originally used as servants quarters) of the attic.
The narrative spreads up into the ninety-nine rooms (one for each chapter), moving around the schema like a piece on a chessboard. Exactly like one, the knight.
Perec decided, in fact, to progress according to a rule beloved to the OuLiPo group, the L-shaped knight move, and to touch each room only once.
The piece may begin in any square and only travel once through each square. If it finishes in the beginning square, the path can be classified as "closed", otherwise, as "open": Perec’s configuration falls in the latter, the open one.
The same limitation also suggests that the book is divided into six parts: each time the knight hits all four sides of the chessboard, the part finishes, and a new chapter begins in the next one.
As previously mentioned, though, Perec didn’t bound himself too rigidly to this set of rules and willfully manipulated them, coming up with exceptions, errors to his own matrix. Interestingly enough, even these holes have their own justification. Perec came up with 99 and not 100 chapters as the structure may suggest.
The exception happening around chamber 67 to which follows the 65, leaving room 66, at the lower left corner of the structure, undiscovered as the storyline based on Polygraphie du Cavalier starts to wane. Nothing strange, however, because of the clìnamen, an intentional departure from the established norm, another artifice used by supporters of the OuLiPo.
The manipulation reoccur at every level, starting with the main storyline, where Bartlebooth ultimately fails the highly organized project of a lifetime. The narrative itself reveals to the readers a meta-explanation for the exception: “a little girl munching the corner of her petit-beurre” painted on the lid of an old biscuit box made of tin at the end of chapter LXVI.
Use the door on the right to find out more about the other constraints.
2022, Diego Chillo & Laura Travaglini