Talk:Life: A User's Manual

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Just a quick note on the section entitled "The Novel". Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246: "Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile." I also agree that much more could be done on this entry. While it's obviously pretty hard to explain a lot of this stuff, I really don't think we've managed to capture yet what is so great about the novel. I might have a go at some point. We'll have to see if I can find the time. James

[edit] Expansion

Just a quick note on the section entitled "The Novel." Bartlebooth doesn't fall in love with Marguerite Winckler, Serge Valene does. See p246 in Bellos' translation: "Valene declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile." For what it's worth, I also agree that this entry needs an update. While it's obviously very hard to do justice to a novel like this here, I think we can do better. I'll see if I can find the time to have a go at some point. James


Doesn't look like anyone has been working intently on this page in awhile. I'd like to expand it some more, some of the sections are quite good, but some are rather short and perhaps a little too brief for those who have not actually read the novel. I also think the page coul possibly use to be reorganized a little bit -- perhaps find some way to integrate the "novel" section with the "elements" section? Any suggestions?JKillah 15:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)


Capitalization police please note: "La Vie mode d'emploi" is exactly how the title appears in both of my copies. :-) -- user:Tarquin

Proper names of things like books need to have the capitalization the the author of the book placed on his/her book. This is a noted exception to the capitalization rule. However, my searches indicate that the title is sometimes expressed with a lowercase "v", as in, La vie mode d'emploi. But since the capitalization is correct, in this case, I think a redirect is in order from the lowercase term to the properly capitalized term. Thank you for noting the correct capitalization here - It would bave been difficult for me to find this out by trying to translate those search results. --maveric149


I don't want to trespass too much on matters about which others know more than I, but ... Am I right in thinking that the construction of the apartment block is in fact a graeco-latin square of order 10? The interesting thing here is that Leonhard Euler had believed that no such array existed but it was constructed by computer search in 1959. Cutler 11:18, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

yes, that's right. I wrote "double Latin square" because I wasn't sure of the English translation. -- Tarquin 10:54, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Today I added a section on the word puzzles contained in the novel, along with some specifics on the Chapter 51 puzzle with a quote from David Bellos he shared with me via email.

Ewart7034 18:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 07:11, 27 August 2007 (UTC)