Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec (1978)

Picture an apartment building in Paris with its front wall lifted away, so every room stands exposed at once, frozen at one moment of a June evening: a figure halted on the stairs, a meal half-eaten, a manuscript abandoned mid-sentence. Georges Perec moves through these rooms the way a knight tours a chessboard, never twice on the same square, and in each he records everything, certain no detail is too small to save: the inherited grudges, the souvenirs bought abroad and never used. At the heart of it stands Bartlebooth, who gives fifty years to a project built to leave no trace, learning to paint, then crossing the world to make five hundred watercolours of harbours, then dissolving each one to blank paper once it has become a jigsaw and been solved. Every tenant carries the residue of a whole life, and the book's quiet, enormous tenderness is its refusal to let them vanish. Bartlebooth dies with the last piece in his hand, and the gap it was meant to fill is not the shape of the piece.