On the ‘contemporary European’ shelf of Collected Works, a bookstore in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building, you can find a copy French novelist Georges Perec’s 1978 masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual.

This remarkable book tells the story of a Parisian apartment building, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, and the intersecting lives of its inhabitants. The key narrative of the book is about the wealthy dilettante Bartlebooth, whose life plan is this: for ten years he learns to paint watercolours, with the aid of a painter who lives in the building. For twenty years he travels the world, painting harbour-scape watercolours of 500 ports, with the aid of his assistant Smautf.