Thinking about Georges Perec

After reading descriptions about how Life: A User's Manual is written, I found it hard to understand how Perec got from a set of rules to a novel! I worked out which order the units of the house went in (and then found one on the internet) to see if this made it any clearer. It did, but I wanted there to be a visual pattern and there wasn't! The main rule that is being used

is The Knight's Tour which is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. There are many solutions to the problem, of which exactly 26,534,728,821,064 have the knight finishing on a square from which it attacks the starting square. This one is on a 8 x 8 grid but creates a geometric pattern. For some reason I'm enjoying the book more now I've done all this. The Knights Tour wasn't the only writing constraint Perec used.

He created a complex system which would generate for each chapter a list of items, references or objects which that chapter should then contain or allude to. He described this system as a "machine for inspiring stories". There are 42 lists of 10 objects each, gathered into 10 groups of 4 with the last two lists a special "Couples" list.

Some examples:
-number of people involved
-length of the chapter in pages
-an activity
-a position of the body
-emotions
-an animal
-reading material
-countries
-2 lists of novelists, from whom a literary quotation is required

The way in which these apply to each chapter is governed by an array called a Graeco-Latin Square. This is an example:

It means that no two squares contain the same ordered pair of symbols and every row and every column has exactly one of each symbol. To further complicate things, the 38th and 39th list are named "Missing" and "False" and each list comprises the numbers 1 to 10. The number these lists give for each chapter indicates one of the 10 groups of 4 lists, and folds the system back on itself: one of the elements must be omitted, and one must be false in some way. Things become complicated when the Missing and False numbers refer to group 10, which includes the Missing and False lists.