The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read Highlight

Life: A User’s Manual (1978), is a compendium of new forms of intricacy. It is set in a single Parisian block of apartments. Throwing a ten-by-ten matrix over the building, the focus moves from point to point, chapter to chapter, following the Knight’s Tour chess conundrum (where a single knight must touch each and every square on the board only once). From the ground-floor curio-dealer Marcia to the garret-dwelling Smautf, it is a snapshot and a history, a Boccaccio-style anthology of stories,