Apartment block One of Perec's long-standing projects was the description of a Parisian apartment block as it could be seen if the entire facade were removed, exposing every room. Perec was obsessed with lists: such a description would be exhaustive down to the last detail. While Bartlebooth's puzzle narrative is the central story of the book, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier is the subject of the novel. 11 rue Simon-Crubellier has been frozen at the instant in time when Bartlebooth dies. People are frozen in different apartments, on the stairs, and in the cellars. Some rooms are vacant. The narrative moves like a knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to it). In each room we learn about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about someone they have come into contact with. Many of the characters at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, such as Smautf, Valène, Winckler, and Morellet, have a direct connection to Bartlebooth's quest. Thus, in those rooms the Bartlebooth puzzle-narrative tends to be carried further. Many of the narratives, however, are linked to Bartlebooth only by being related to the history of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier.
Knight's tour A
knight's tour as a means of generating a novel was a long-standing idea of the
Oulipo group. Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10×10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics, and 10 rooms across, including two for the stairwell. Each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight's moves on the grid. However, as the novel contains only 99 chapters, bypassing a basement, Perec expands the theme of Bartlebooth's failure to the structure of the novel as well.
Lists The content of Perec's novel was partly generated by 42 lists, each containing 10 elements (e.g. the "Fabrics" list contains ten different fabrics). Perec used
Graeco-Latin squares or "bi-squares" to distribute these elements across the 99 chapters of the book. A bi-square is similar to a
sudoku puzzle, though more complicated, as
two lists of elements must be distributed across the grid. In the pictured example, these two lists are the first three letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets; each cell contains a Greek and a Latin character, and, as in a sudoku, each row and column of the grid also contains each character exactly once. Using the same principle, Perec created 21 bi-squares, each distributing two lists of 10 elements. This allowed Perec to distribute all 42 of his 10-element lists across the 99 chapters. Any given cell on the 10x10 map of the apartment block could be cross-referenced with the equivalent cell on each of the 21 bi-squares, so for each chapter a different list of 42 elements to mention could be produced. The elements in Lists 39 and 40 ("Gap" and "Wrong") are nothing more than the numbers 1 to 10; if Perec consulted the "Wrong" bi-square and found, for example, a "6" in a given cell, he would ensure that the chapter corresponding to that cell would do something "wrong" when including the particular fabric, colour, accessory or jewel the bi-squares for the lists in group 6 had assigned to the cell/chapter in question. Perec also sub-divided 40 of these lists into 10 groups of four (the sixth sub-group, for example, contains the lists "Fabrics", "Colours", "Accessories" and "Jewels",) which gave the story-generating machine an additional layer of complexity. Another variation comes from the presence of Lists 39 and 40 in the 10th sub-group; Lists 39 and 40 would sometimes number their own sub-group as the one to be tampered with in a given chapter. According to Perec's biographer, David Bellos, this self-reflexive aspect of Lists 39 and 40 "allowed him to apply 'gap' in such cases by
not missing out any other constraint in the group ('gapping the gap') or by missing out a constraint in a group
not determined by the bi-square number ('wronging the wrong') or by
not getting anything wrong at all ('gapping the wrong')". It is important to note that Perec acknowledged the lists were often mere prompts; certain chapters include far fewer than 42 of their prescribed elements. ==Appendix==