Madeleine Maaskant, Manet van Montfrans, P PERS | Publishers, 2007, 54 blz.
In The National Museum of Ethnology, a dream, an architect and a lecturer in French literature wander round the rooms of a a nineteenth-century building, situated in Leiden’s Steenstraat 1. Their thoughts dwell on the eventful recent history of the museum’s redesigning, and on the solution offered by La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), the ingeniously constructed encyclopaedic novel by Georges Perec. The sparsely lit galleries not only reveal a multitude of objects, each with its own story, but also the presence of a further four characters: the designer, the collector, the curator and the director, who all play their own role in this Perecquian story.