Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec, David Bellos (Translator), Andrew Leak (Translator)

With the American publication of Life, a User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was immediately recognized in the U.S. as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our compulsive obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.

Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.

In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.

Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate.

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, Classics, 20th Century, Novels, Literature

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.

It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").

W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.

Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things: A Story of the Sixties predates all those tiresome novels about corporate-culture ennui, Ballardian death of affect, and dehumanisation through advertising and leaves them weeping into their MaxPower V9 toasters-cum-dildos. What a heartbreaking and beautiful novella! Oh Georges, is it really so sad? Perec narrates from a distance, leaving his characters Sylvie and Jérôme to fumble through a blank lower bourgeois existence, besotted with appliances and desperate to shimmy up the ladder without accepting their place as adults. By piling up descriptions, razor-sharp character analysis and cultural scene-setting, Perec captures the painful loneliness of upwardly mobile corporate life—his writing glitters with perfect, wrenching subtlety and humour. Oh Georges, Georges, Georges! And then there’s A Man Asleep, a beautiful exploration of complete disengagement from the culture, written in energetic second-person prose, chock with penetrating insights into man’s desire to escape the terror and horror of everyday life. An absolutely magnificent duo of novellas—epochal, strange and powerful.

[Helga زن زندگی آزادی مرد میهن آبادی · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was extremely bleak! Do not read if you are depressed or remotely bored with your life.

-Things ***

Jérôme and Sylvie were the "new generation" and they loved wealth before they loved life. But after owning everything and surrounding themselves with belongings, they became paralyzed by the immensity of their desires. They thought they were suffocating.

The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.

And so, they decide to leave everything and travel… but then, guess what? They get bored with their newly found freedom and come back and try to copy their previous style of living.

I can summarize this book in a sentence and excuse my French: C'est la vie!

-A Man Asleep ***

Man sitting on a narrow bed… a book open on his knees, eyes vacant…

He has no desire to carry on, no desire to defend himself, no desire to attack…he is waiting for nothing.
He is a young student who has become indifferent towards everything; towards life, and in a sense is asleep.
The story is told in second person narrative.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book brings together two early novellas by Georges Perec, who is best known for Life: A User's Manual. In both cases these are strong on concept and rather weak in characterisation. These are not easy stories to review, and neither is essential to understanding Perec, so I'll just write a few brief notes.

Things follows a Parisian couple in their 20s and explores the way their lives are determined by material possessions, and follow stereotypical paths for all of their attempts at individuality. Although this sounds critical the story is told in a matter-of-fact non-judgmental way.

A Man Asleep is a rather bleak tale of a young man losing interest in life, probably inspired by Kafka.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two intriguing and poignant novellas (Perec's first published work) that you can clearly see had a influence when approaching Life: A Users Manual years later. Forging his trademark iconoclastic literary style that fully emerges in later work, his technique of crowding fictional space with an abundance of almost rococo richly details and decor is also apparent here. So is an air of at first unnoticeable melancholy, that seems to drift around his characters like a ghost.

'Things: A Story of the Sixties' coolly pinpoints the yearnings and malaise of young Jerome and Sylvie, market researchers who analyze their interviewees' needs just as Perec inventories their own. Media slogans and trendy magazines dictate the luxuries they would buy if they had money. To escape the consumerist mythology, they move to Sfax, a drab desert outpost in Tunisia. Even when confronted with luxury, the austerity of North Africa has purged them as much from want as from envy. But although they locate a beautiful villa, their dream eludes them. The narrative slips into future tense: pining for Paris with nostalgia.

'In A Man Asleep' (I prefered this one to the other) Perec asks to what extent a man can detach himself from his fellows and still function. Wandering graduate dropout denies the pressures of time, first by examining each instant as he lies in bed, studying the cracks and flaws in the ceiling of his tiny garret room. Then by drifting through Parisian streets in an imitation of sleep's shadowy oblivion. With Perec, all the little finer details matter, just passing through the day is done in a way that draws vivid images, pondering over life with a thought process that digs deeper into your soul. Despite his characters trapped, weary and decelerating actions, Perec's fertile imagination throughout is fresh and appealing, delivering a worthy read for any Perec fan, and actually a good place to start for anyone thinking of Reading Life: A Users Manual.

An Impressive work.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a brief shining moment Things by Georges Perec stood on my real-life to-be-read shelf next to Flings by Justin Taylor, and I had half a mind to go the whole hog and buy Strings by Allison Dickson and Wings by Aprilyne Pike to go with them. Georges would have liked that I think. But I read Flings, then Things and Strings and Wings have faded into the unserious penumbra of whimsy which seems to follow me around most days.

This novel is not really a novel, it’s a rueful self-filleting, a wry meditation , a cool, dry analysis, of Georges’ own generation of early 1960s lower middle-class slackers. I’d bet my next paycheck that it’s 99% autobiography. Jerome and Sylvie, and their friends, all drift from being uncommitted students to casual work for market research agencies, none of them have proper careers. They live in cramped apartments and comb Paris to find affordable objets d’art to stuff them with. They have the taste of the upper middle class but they have no money. Things is page after page of more than a little self-loathing contemptuous analysis of the lives and attitudes of Jerome and Sylvie, with lists of all the stuff they bought, the things. There is no dialogue at all, and no discernible events. Here he is mocking their pretentious political paranoia:

The enemy was unseen. Or rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.

It must be a French thing, this wry, condescending, academic know-it-all narrator voice – you hear it in Amelie and in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and in the novels of Michel Hoellebecq, for instance. Here it is again. It’s tiring. Take a look at this sentence:

In advertising circles – which were generally located by quasi-mystical tradition to the left of centre, but were rather better defined by technocracy, the cult of efficiency, modernity, complexity, by the taste for speculating on future trends and by the more demagogic strain in sociology, as well as by the still very widespread opinion that nine-tenths of the population were fools just able to sing the praises of anything or anybody in unison – in advertising circles, then, it was fashionable to despise all merely topical political issues and to grasp History in nothing smaller than centuries.

Okay, one thing does happen to our tiresome and fraying at the edges couple – they observe their circle of friends dwindling as they each decide to join the salaried middle class properly by getting proper jobs and going to live in the suburbs. To prove they aren’t such braindead materialists as that J & S get jobs as teachers in Tunisia, it’ll be great. Except that one of the jobs doesn’t work out and they end up living in Sfax which is fairly grim, or was in 1962. This is the best part of the book, the disillusion of this brief dream is something we all might have experienced. Sadness and deflation is what this brief novel is all about. You have been warned.

M Perec is clearly a brainy and impressive writer but my God he has that one continual uncontrollable tic running through every other sentence – he thinks it’s his very own cool style – which will set your teeth on edge by page 3. Here is a particularly florid example :

They were in the centre of a vacuum, they had settled into a no man’s land of parallel streets, yellow sands, inlets and dusty palms, a world they did not understand, that they did not seek to understand, because in their past lives they had never equipped themselves to have to adapt, one day, to change, to mould themselves to a different kind of scenery, or climate, or style of living… Jerome could easily seem to have brought his homeland, or rather his quartier, his ghetto, his stamping-ground, with him on the soles of his English shoes… Sfax simply did not have a Mac Mahon, or a Harry’s Bar, or a Balzar, or a Contrescarpe, or a Salle Pleyel, or Berges de la Seine une nuit de juin. In such a vacuum, precisely because of this vacuum, because of the absence of all things, because of such a fundamental vacuity, such a blank zone, a tabula rasa, they felt as if they were being cleansed

So everything has to be Perecised – three synonyms, minimum, or the reader will simply not understand. I felt bamboozled, banjaxed and almost bullied, as if George was prodding his finger, his appendage, his digit right into my sternum, my chestal cavity, my very frontage.

[Katia N]

The copy i’ve read contained the English translation of Perec’s two early novellas: his debut Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) and the text that was published slightly later in 1967, A Man Asleep. In the introduction, David Bellos opines that these texts ‘shed light on each other, represent the two different sides of something like the same coin.’. I din't quite see it that way. There are quite a few elements that unite these novellas as you would expect, but fundamentally i felt that they were different enough to be written about separately. Or maybe they’ve just created a very different impressions on me. In any case, I’ve written about Things below. And i plan to write about A man asleep later and maybe to post a separate review. Both novellas are unbelievably good.

Things

I’ve read this novella for the first time when i was fifteen or maybe sixteen at most. After it was first released in France it was quite quickly translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union in the late 60s. For comparison, it has been first translated into English only in the 90s. Such a rush was related to the view by the soviet bosses that the book contained a critique of decaying capitalism in its most poisonous feature: consumerism. Ironically, the book, like anything else of a value has become the subject of severe “deficit”. However, my aunt was lucky to have “a connection” in a bookshop so she managed to get a copy that i’ve managed to pick up from her shelf twenty years later or so.

When i’ve read this book then i felt a mixture of mild boredom, moral superiority and contempt for the couple of protagonists solely interested in “things”. In my young eyes, any good book, must have contained a thread of romantic love in some form even if tangentially. Otherwise it would be a waisted opportunity by the author. This story didn’t conform to my high standards in this respect. This is on the top of being “too materialistic”. I’ve finished it but then it went back on a shelf and was quickly forgotten without further ado.

When i’ve opened this book a week ago or so and started reading, i have not expected at all the strength and weirdness of emotional turmoil it was about to bring. Should i call it ‘a madeleine cake’ moment? If yes, there was more than one of those.

First of all, i’ve remembered my fifteen year old self in my room with this book next to my metal green table lamp at a dusk; a poplar tree, a broken streetlamp and a snowfall behind the window. I am thinking: why those characters are so dull and their life is so repetitive? How can they get excited so much while just sitting in some restaurant? It is fair to say that by that stage I have been to a proper restaurant exactly once celebrating the fiftieth of the same aunt who got the book. And I found the whole endeavour not simply dull but quite trying, a total waist of time. All of this has suddenly come back in a single wave bringing to the shore that mixture of vulnerability and arrogance of being fifteen I’ve totally forgotten.

Once again, they would push open a door into a small restaurant and joyfully, almost ritually absorb the ambient warmth, the clutter of cutlery, the clinking of glasses, the muffed sounds of conversation, the inviting whiteness of napkins. They would select their wine punctiliously, unfold their napkins, and then it would seem to them, as they sat in the warm, in a close huddle, smoking a cigarette to be stubbed out in a moment’s time when the hors d’oeuvres would arrive, that their life was going to be only the infinite sum of such auspicious moments, and that they would always be happy, because they deserved to be happy, because they would manage to stay free, because happiness was within them. They would sit facing each other, they were going to eat after having been hungry, and all these things - the thick white tablecloth, the blue blot of a packet of Gitanes, the earthenware plates, the rather heavy cutlery, the stem glasses, the wicker basket full of newly baked bread - constituted the ever-fresh setting of an almost visceral pleasure, pleasure so intense as to verge on numbness: an impression, almost exactly opposite and almost exactly identical to the experience of speed, of a tremendous stability, of tremendous plentitude. From this table set for dinner arose for them the feeling of perfect synchrony: they were in tune with the world, they were swimming in it, in their element, with nothing to fear from it.

And this what i have not expected at all: the second “madeleine cake”: I’ve vividly remembered a similar moment in my life, a similar feeling. I was in my mid-twenties in a big wild city a few thousands miles away from my childhood room with a view of a poplar and a streetlamp. I was not fifteen anymore, the Soviet Union was not there anymore either. What Perec described has happened to me, almost exactly to the letter: i’ve remembered the restaurant, the ambience, the napkins, cigarettes (Gauloises not Gitanes in my case), wine and this momentary, visceral sensation of infinite freedom and therefore - happiness.

Perec has written the story using this collective voice “they”. He designed it in a such a way that this “they” could be just that couple in the book, or their social segment, or their generation. But i felt it could have been “we” as if: my friends and I. Very different time and place, but also so similar: we were "young professionals", for the first time not permanently starving after hungry years, for the first time not penniless; having some cash to spend unwisely and doing it: exquisite food, cigarettes, travel (often paid by business) and yes, books. (Maybe - not necessarily in that order).

When I read this book at fifteen I would not believe that in less than a decade I would have become “them” and would love it. When i am reading it now it is a memory since long forgotten how that happiness felt in my twenties. How a happiness could be different, reckless almost. Remembering that feeling does not mean I’ve actually had it when I’ve read the passage now. Instead, I’ve experienced something akin to a quiet joy mixed with light sadness.

With all these “things” and details, Perec has targeted for the specifics of the time and place but somehow has managed to catch this more universal feeling of being young. You are independent for the first time and know it. You are free. You might start to suspect it might not last forever. All those “big” decisions are lying in wait either to be made by you or by life if you miss the train. You might suspect that much, but you are not quite ready for this yet: you are thinking that everyone else needs to decide, move on, become serious but secretly hoping that you might be an exception.

You are also convinced that you are wiser than your parents have been. You would not make their mistakes. But how do you know who were your parents in their youth, who were those people before they’ve had you? It was another point the novella made me think about. You cannot know directly, you were not there. They’ve changed since. They might tell you some stories. But those stories are likely filtered through the lens that they are told to their child. Also they might have naturally forgotten themselves how it was, like i did before I’ve opened Perec. And for some of us, our parents are not there anymore to ask.

From where I am now, I can only have a glimpse to my parents’ young years through a thickening fog of time. I can look at a few remaining photos taken in the places unknown to me, full of beautiful young people, many of them i’ve never met, some i do not recognise. I could try to guess their emotions, thoughts, desires from these images. Maybe I could deduce some stories or let my imagination do the work.

But also i have got some access to the parents’ world of things. Many of them preceded me: a furniture made in Czech republic and Eastern Germany that was subject of my mum’s big pride together with two sets of china - one for coffee and one for tea. My brother and I were supposed to share those sets when we grow up. Nothing was available in the open in the shops. She fought battles for those things among secret queues, “connections” through friends, little bribes, boxes of chocolate etc. She has got them eventually and put them on display behind the glass in the one of the furniture’s pieces. I do not remember having coffee from those cups. There was no coffee to get. We are still not sure what to do with those sets of china packed now in storage miles away. Things like my father’s record player made in Riga; my aunt’s shelves and the books on those shelves and her three pairs of very fashionable, extremely high hilled shoes made in Italy. The latter were the most fascinating objects. I would put them on in front of the mirror aged five or so, but i would not be able to walk in them. Many of these things long gone but i can see them now in my memory. And they help me to guess something i would not be able to know otherwise about my parents' youth. When i was reading Perec, i’ve “remembered” my parents in a way i’ve never managed to know them.

There is of course a strong sociological thread in the text of the novella. A shadow of Roland Barthes with his “signs" is looking over Perec’s shoulder. Also some of his observations are absolutely spot-on today:

In advertising circles - which were generally located by quasi-mythical tradition to the left of centre, but were rather better defined by technocracy, the cult of efficiency, modernity, complexity, by the taste for speculating on future trends and by the more demagogic strain in sociology as well as by the still very widespread opinion that nine-tenths of the population were fools just able to sing the praises of anything or anybody in unison - in advertising circles, then, it was fashionable to despise all merely topical political issues and to grasp History in nothing smaller than centuries.

It sounds to me, with a little caveat of 'left of center' and 'grasp of History', this is a succinct description of the current ideas in the heads of many high-profile chaps leading the pack in the Silicon Valley and spilling it over into world politics. Could Perec imagine that his words would be so pertinent in the context that did not exit in his day?

His magical touch though was how he combined his witty, well observed sociology with such a moving atmosphere detached, but very personal at the same time. Things was not about things at the end.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two early novellas in one book. "Things," the first novella, includes maybe some of the best autobiographical-seeming expository stretches (no dialogue, no traditional scenes) about life from age 21 to 30 (albeit here in the 1960s in Paris and Tunisia) I've read. Perec's obsessive detail/description is like Nabokov but not as precious/obtuse, plus he's consistently insightful, often unusual, and so generous in terms of perception and wisdom. Someone should reissue this novella solo.

"A Man Asleep" I'll admit to not finishing -- a second-person (apparently Lorrie Moore didn't invent the POV) studenty slacker Handke/Beckett-type exercise in describing nothingness, in not doing, in indifference/detachment. Excellent and worthwhile in terms of descriptions of a young man's life (mostly) in Paris in the early '60s, but even an intentional project by a writer as good as Perec to describe cracks in the ceiling and what you see when you close your eyes or what it's like to read the newspaper didn't really seem to me to serve as too much more than an excellent soporific. I'll keep it by my bed and use it as such when necessary. Admirable and all but I need to move on to something else for now.

[Iryna Chernyshova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Дуже ритмічна, майже музична, затягуюча проза.

Першій твір про зародження протохіпстерів. Друга - потік свідомості однака.

Треба ще щось у Перека почитати.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things made me melancholic of the inner life of my early 20s when I stared at shop windows, in love, wanting what I didn't have, imagining the lifestyle posed in magazines and movies and shop fronts. Its a time of desire, longing, wanting, when objects easily influence one's reason. You know why lifestyle marketing works, Perec didn't write sociology and advertising copy, but he got to the heart of this moment in life and our relationship to capitalism and consumption. Even thinking about the book makes me melancholic for that moment in time, before you had things, before you had the money for things, but things conjured so many dreams.

[To-The-Point Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerôme and Sylvie are a couple in the 1960s. They buy things. They are bored. They have left-wing opinions. It's all rather pointless.

And there's no internet.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, if still alive, would be as old as my mother. This was his first book and it made him famous. He started writing it in 1962, the protagonists are two young French, a guy and a girl, the type we call now as "young professionals," the setting is in France, circa 1960s of course.

Fast forward half a century later, I'll have my morning coffee at Starbucks, or at the Figaro nearby, and I would be amidst young people, like the characters in this book, and I'll see them tinkering with their latest electronic gadgets, wearing their fashionable clothes, their branded shoes and bags; overhear them talk about their most recent weekend nightouts, who is now going out with whom, their plans for the summer, a trip somewhere, sex beaches, shopping destinations in nearby countries, all the while sipping their cups and puffing thier smokes like movie stars, then when they get exhausted doing the leisurely and remember they need to sleep, will step out, hail a taxi, satisfied that they've escaped the misery of taking much cheaper public transport (bus, jeep) as what they did when they were still studying --all of them out of call centers after their evening shift. And I'd tell myself: these people should read Perec's "Things: A Story of the Sixties" and know that despite these distractions and amusements they happily inflict upon themselves, they belong to another doomed generation. That they are "right in the middle of the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world" (Perec) from which the majority of them won't be able to escape.

This, then, would be most fun for me: for them to read this book as I watch their faces when they see themselves in there and , by magic, I also get to see their thought processes as they get horrified, in one small step after another, as Perec describes to them their hell.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

As David Bellos points out in his introduction these 2 short novels present opposite views. One, of the aspiring young couple who strive and strive, but to what end? The other, of a lonely solitary experience where life appears to have no point.
Don't expect much in the way of plot or character development. But do expect thought provoking literature.

[Jim Elkins]

An Unclear Exercise in Writing

A Man Asleep was published in 1967, and translated in 1990. It's about a young man who gives up his school examinations, his friends, and his purpose in life. He does as little as possible, wants as little as possible, takes as little interest in life as he can. He is "asleep."

The interest here isn't the form of life Perec is trying to imagine, because this is an exercise in writing. (It isn't like Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation.) The book is interesting to me mainly because I can't quite tell what the writing exercise is. Here are five possible precedents or models.

1. Because the character does very little, and spends days on end in his tiny garret, A Man Asleep may owe some of its torpor and pessimism to Beckett, especially early Beckett like Murphy. But Beckett's willful self-paralysis is presented as a condition of life, of living. Here, it's something the narrator has to train himself for, and it's also an illness, from which he will finally awaken.
The introduction by David Bellos makes it sound as if it's not likely the character will survive his "hell": but at the end, the narrator has several crucial insights. "You were alone and that is all there is to it and you wanted to protect yourself... But your refusal is futile. Your neutrality is meaningless." A character in Beckett would not be likely to "wake up" in that fashion.

2. Because the character wanders all around Paris—the book is also an inventory of parks, boulevards, and museums—it's also reminiscent of Guy Debord. Yet Perec is at pains to say his character is not a flaneur: he doesn't take any interest in what he sees, and in fact he trains himself not to care. The only two people in the book who attract the narrator's attention are a possibly psychotic man in a park, who does nothing but sit and stare, and the narrator's neighbor in the garret, whom he hears through the wall. This is the opposite of Debord's psychogeographies and his dérive.

3. Duchamp may be less distant than he seems. The narrator here cultivates indifference; he trains himself not to judge, not to care. He has an interest in lack of affect. "Indifference has neither beginning nor end... indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs" (p. 185). There's a telling passage in which he's out in the country, looking at a tree. He says he could spend his whole life looking at the tree, "never exhausting it and never understanding it, because there is nothing for you to understand, just something to look at: when all is said and done, all you can say about the tree is that it is a tree; all the tree can say to you is that it is a tree." (p. 153)
This particular passage isn't precisely Duchampian—it is more late-Romantic natural philosophy—but what comes next shows that for Perec, the tree is the opposite of affect: "This is why, perhaps, you never go walking with a dog, because the dog looks at you, pleads with you, speaks to you... You cannot remain neutral in the company of a dog." (p. 154) The determined anti-aesthetic is originally Duchamp's.

4. I wonder if Nietzsche's sense of the animal is also behind some of this. Perec's narrator imagines a life without history, without past or future. Simple, self-evident life, "like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing, like six socks soaking in a pink plastic bowl, like a fly or a mollusc, like a cow or a snail, like a child or an old man, like a rat." (p. 177)
The character is trying to strip himself of human motivations, which means culture, which means history. "To let yourself be carried along by the crowds, and the streets. To walk the length of the embankments... to waste your time. To have no projects, to feel no impatience. To be without desire, or resentment, or revolt." (p. 161)

5. Or, in the spirit of constrained writing, the perversity of the contraint itself may be what matters. The narrator reads Le Monde every day from five to seven o'clock, and sometimes rereads entire issues. He goes "line by line, systematically. It is an excellent exercise." (p. 168) But "reading Le Monde is simply a way of wasting, or gaining, an hour or two, of measuring once again your indifference." (p. 169) Perec comes close to the supposedly affectless, rule-bound, rote, non-semantic sort of reading that was later associated with conceptual poetry.

I don't mean it's necessary to decide between these possibilities or to find an optimal literary lineage. But the book presents itself as the sort of mixture of motives and results that suggests a lack of decision about literary, philosophic, and psychoanalytic models—an indecision, or mixture, which Perec decided to enact in the form of a text rather than determine and present as an essay, as philosophic fiction, or as a consistent experiment (as in some of his other work, or as in Beckett). The result is an unclear exercise in writing, whose main expressive content, for me, is the writer's uncertain, inconstant, but sometimes determined, effort at avoiding normalcy.

*

The book is also interesting for its second-person narration. Perec uses the second-person singular informal French "tu," so that the book sounds, in English, like an inner monologue. But it was not intended that way. This edition has an excellent very brief introduction by Bellos, which quotes a line from a review by Roger Kleman: "The teller of the tale could well be the one to whom the tale is told... The second person of A Man Asleep is the grammatical form of absolute loneliness, of utter deprivation." The film version that Perec helped make has a woman's voice narrating the young man's life: all this by way of saying the voice isn't the character's inner monologue, but a speech directed to him.

(Revised April 2024)

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Perec isn't it? Never let me down yet. These are his first 2 novels, so his experimentalism hadn't yet fully developed yet. But these are both fascinating in their own way and brilliantly written.

Video review to follow,

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

120119: these are two short works. it is an error to think of them as ‘novels’. it is mistaken also to think they are nonfiction ‘essays’. in the first case, there is not much interest in shaping the usual furniture of fiction short or long, in the second, there is no careful deployment of rhetoric, assertions, serious arguments, to give the idea that the text means or refers much to any difficult idea...

in fact, the ideas are simple, in ‘things’ the reader is given descriptive form to the idea that maybe the material wealth we accumulate is not connected to any human value except as owner of these ‘things’. in ‘a man asleep’ the reader is given absurd, realistic, fantastic, image of being other than human by having no connection to things of any sort, material or more importantly emotionally, with the idea this is the ‘pure’ way to be human. rather than truly, i suggest, by this severing of desires, simply becoming someone else’s ‘thing’...

[Richard R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection earlier in the year, I wanted to read the novel it's based on. Now that I've done so, I can certainly say that the two novels are fairly closely paralleled: Latronico depicts a pair of graphic designers working in noughties Berlin before rising rents force them out while Perec depicts a pair of market researchers working in sixties Paris before the precarity of their jobs forces them to take better paid work in Bordeaux. Latronico's novel tends to veer between depicting his characters sympathetically (as they try to help Syrian refugees, for example) and critiquing the shallowness of their bourgeois lifestyle. Perec is rather less subtle and does tend to depict Jerome and Sylvie as nouveau riche who hanker after aristocratic lifestyles but balk at accepting the work ethic needed to pay for it: "Money consumed them entirely. They did not stop thinking about it. Even their emotional life, to a considerable extent, depended on it directly."

As it happens, the part I most enjoyed was the second story, A Man Asleep, which reminds me of a modernist retelling of Goncharov's Oblomov, in which the protagonist refuses a live of action or direction and settles into an entirely passive existence: "You do not really feel cut out for living, for doing, for making: you only want to go on, to forget... all around you, all your life, you have seen the esteem in which action is held... you are the... one on whom history has lost its hold."

[Simon Hollway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perec's snappy Story of the Sixties should be subtitled 'The Rise and Fall of the Hipster.' Modern, timeless and deliciously snarky. The only glaring anachronism is the married protagonists' irregular employment as market researchers - replace that with freelance web or graphic design and Perec has perfectly parodied any couple in their late 20s currently vibing on down in Hoxton, Williamsburg or Fitzroy. Highly recommended, this is a satisifying yet quick read UNLESS you over-indulge in the litany of ideal home furnishings that Perec satirises in the opening chapters. His descriptive prowess provoked a two hour SchadenGoogle as I abandoned the book to conduct an impromptu search for the perfect bookcase to populate my perfect library currently being equity funded via the currency of hopes, dreams and delusions. I AM the person that Perec is parodying. Excellent. Four stars, that man.

Sadly, the novella in the bunk below, 'A Man Asleep', is all rather hopeless - a shuffling two star character sketch that attempts to describe a student teetering on the precipice of lethargy. Oblomov it isn't. The narrator's voice tees off in a very self-assured tone, conjuring up the odd shapes that flit across our corneas as we descend into (or ascend from) a semi-somnolent state. It's all very precise, a bit tricksy and totally misses the mark. Perec trots on, blithely assuming he's hammered home a winning streak of images and allusions whereas he's executed the literary equivalent of nailing a jelly to the wall. Flabby, incoherent and really rather dull.

[Vanya Hrynkiv · Rating 2 out of 5]

Тут дві книги в одній. Дуже складно було для розуміння, зокрема тому що тут жодного діалогу на дві книги 🙂
Але написано гарно, може просто не зайшло в настрій, чи ще щось

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Things: A Story of the Sixties

That was where real life was, the life they wanted to know, that they wanted to lead

Things: A Story of the Sixties is David Bellos's 1990 retranslation of Georges Perec's 1965 novel Une histoire des années soixante, winner of the Prix Renaudot, Perec's debut novel. There was an earlier English translation by Helen Lane in 1968 under the title Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties.

I read the novel in preparation for reading Perfection by translated by Sophie Hughes from Vincenzo Latronico's original, which the author has said in based on this novel, indeed started conceptually as a paragraph-by-paragraph re-write.

Things opens with a lengthy description of an apartment, but written in a conditional tense:

Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respect-ively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle-steamer named Ville-de-Montereau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. There, the carpet would give way to an almost yellow woodblock floor, partly covered by three faded rugs.

and which concludes, after 4 pages of similarly tedious material, which is best skipped:

There, life would be easy, simple. All the servitudes, all the problems brought by material existence would find a natural solution. A cleaning lady would come every morning. Every fortnight, wine, oil and sugar would be delivered.

It then switches to the story of a Parisian couple, almost always referred to as a collective 'they' - Jérôme was twenty-four and Sylvie twenty-two. They were both market researchers. Their own situation is rather different, the opening pages more what they aspire to:

With a total floor area of thirty-five square metres, which they never dared check, their flat consisted of a minute entrance hall, a cramped kitchen, half of which had been converted into a washroom, a modest-sized bedroom, an all-purpose room - library, living-room or study, spare bedroom - and an ill-defined nook, halfway between a broom-cupboard and a corridor, in which space had somehow been found for a matchbox fridge, an electric water-heater, an improvised wardrobe, a table, at which they ate, and a laundry-box which doubled up as a bench-seat.

But this is the consumering 1960s, and they and their set, strive for more, they distinguished amongst their friends perhaps by not so much wanting to climb a rung or two of the economic ladder, but arrive straight at the top. And they lament the lack of fundamental challenge in their lives, while participating rather half-heartedly in the struggle that does impact French society at this point:

It seemed to them that there they had found a path, or an absence of path, which defined them perfectly, and not just them but all those of their age. Earlier generations, they would sometimes tell each other, had probably found it possible to reach a fuller awareness of themselves and of the world they lived in. They would have liked, perhaps, to have been twenty during the Spanish Civil War, or during the Resistance: in fact, they talked about it a great deal; it seemed to them that the problems facing people then, the problems they imagined people facing, were clearer, even if the need to respond had turned out to be more pressing. As for themselves, the questions that faced them were all booby-traps.

Their nostalgia was slightly hypocritical. The Algerian war had begun with them and was being pursued before their eyes. It hardly affected them; they took action on occasions, but they rarely felt obliged to do so.
[...]
They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness.

Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily. There was nothing, they thought, that concerned them in party manifestos or in government plans: they would sneer at early retirement pension schemes, increased holiday entitlements, free lunches, the thirty-hour week. They wanted superabundance - Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.

After 75 rather repetitive pages of this, and as their friends move on, they make a decisive break in September 1962, accepting teaching jobs in Tunisia. Expecting to be assigned a school in Tunis, they end up in Sfax, 170 miles away - a rather specific feature of an otherwise relatively plotless novel which is in fact autobiographical, Perec's wife Paulette accepting a similar role in 1960/1 and Georges moving there with her.

There they (that is Jérôme and Sylvie) spent was was probably the queerest eight months of their life ... they were absolutely alone. Sfax was an inscrutable city.

The epilogue, written in the future tense, has them returning to Paris, and then, finally, accepting a more conventional executive (although I think the term must have meant something different then) role in advertising in Bordeaux. And the note ends on an ambiguous - and slightly sinister note - on the train journey from Paris:

The journey will be pleasant for a long while. Towards noon they will wander nonchalantly down to the dining car. They will sit by a window, facing each other. They will order two whiskies. They will look at each other one last time with a smile of complicity. The starched table linen, the solid cutlery engraved with the arms of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, the weighty, emblazoned crockery will seem like a prelude to a sumptuous feast. But the meal they will be served will be quite simply tasteless ...

Perec commented on the ending in a 1965 interview translated by Bellos, where he also discusses he influences of the work, and the particular narrative style, lacking dialogue and neither close third person or omnipotent:

Q: So your conclusion is optimistic?

GP: The ending is neither positive nor negative. It opens on to ambiguity; to my mind it's both a happy ending and the saddest conclusion you could imagine, it's a logical ending.... What could be more natural than working to earn a living? For a young intellectual, there are only two solutions, each as desperate as the other--to become a bourgeois, or not to....

Q: It's not just the end of Things that is ambiguous, it's the whole book.

GP: That's right. I don't deny the ambiguity. For me, it's a way of asking a question to which I do not know the answer. All I hope is that I've asked the right question. I must say also that the book was in the beginning two different plans: first an exercise on Barthes's Mythologies, that's to say, on advertising language as it is reflected within us, then a barely heightened description of a particular social set, which happens to be my own. That's perhaps why it took me three years, not to write the book, but to extract, from everything I had written, the 120 final pages of my book. Because everything was a problem: should I give the characters individual, specific lives? Should I have them talk to each other, and about what? An author has little freedom with respect to his characters. He can be above them, or inside them. I chose to stand beside them.

The novel was written before Perec joined Oulipo, but Bellos explains in his helpful introduction that "Things, Perec said* in a lecture at the University of Warwick, was written to fill the blank space created, so to speak, by the juxtaposition of four works of importance to him: Roland Barthes' Mythologies; Flaubert's Sentimental Education; Paul Nizan's La Conspiration; and a striking account of life in the concentration camps, Robert Antelme's L'Espèce humaine", and from the interview above, from Flaubert's work in particular, whole sentences are incorporated in Perec's novel: "I used Flaubert on three levels: first, the three-part sentence rhythm, which had become a kind of personal tic; second, I borrowed some exemplary figures from Flaubert, ready-made elements, a bit like Tarot cards--the journey by boat, the demonstration, the auction, for instance.... And third, there are sentences copied over, purely and simply pasted in."

(* From the 1967 lecture he said: "Quand j’étais en train d’écrire Les Choses, que j’ai recommencé plusieurs fois, il y a vraiment eu une relation nécessaire entre Flaubert, Barthes, Nizan et Antelme. Au centre de ce groupement, il y avait ce livre qui s’appelle Les Choses, qui n’existait pas encore, mais qui s’est mis à exister à partir du moment où il a été décrit par les quatre autres").

Overall - a novel that perhaps read in 2025, feels more of importance for its later influence than particularly relevant or satisfying now (and an oddly tedious read for a 105 page book). 2.5 stars

A Man Asleep

This edition also contains A Man Asleep, translated by Andrew Leak from Perec's 1967 novel Un homme qui dort, which for me was much the stronger work, and which Perec in the aforemention Warwick lecture positioned as a reaction to Things: A Story of the Sixties, where an obsession with possession is replaced by an obsession with indifference.

The novel's epigraph comes from Kafka's Zürau Aphorisms:
“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”

and the novel also has strong echoes of Melville's Bartleby (see below).

It is narrated in the second person but focused on a 25 year old student, about to sit his final exam who one day, about to sit his final exam for the Advanced Certificate in General Sociology, on a hot May day when, while reading a textbook on which he'd lost the thread, drinking instant coffee and revolted by the sight of his socks soaking in a pink plastic tug, loses not so much the will to live, as the will to care as others do:

This is your life. This is yours. You can establish an exact inventory of your meagre fortune, the precise balance sheet of your first quarter-century. You are twenty-five years old, you have twenty-nine teeth, three shirts and eight socks, a few books you no longer read, a few records you no longer play. You do not want to remember anything else, be it your family or your studies, your friends and lovers, or your holidays and plans. You travelled and you brought nothing back from your travels. Here you sit, and you want only to wait, just to wait until there is nothing left to wait for: for night to fall and the passing hours to chime, for the days to slip away and the memories to fade.

You do not see your friends again. You do not open your door. You do not go down to fetch your mail. You do not take back the books you borrowed from the Library of the Institute of Education. You do not write to your parents.

You only go out after nightfall, like the rats, the cats and the monsters. You drift around the streets, you slip into the grubby little cinemas on the Grands Boulevards. Sometimes you walk all night, sometimes you sleep all day.

You are a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, a mollusc. The definitions vary according to the hour of the day, or the day of the week, but the meaning remains clear enough: you do not really feel cut out for living, for doing, for making; you want only to go on, to go on waiting, and to forget.

Such an outlook on life is generally not much appreciated in modern times: all around you, all your life, you have seen the esteem in which action is held, and grand design and enthusiasm: man straining forward, man with his gaze fixed on the horizon, man looking straight ahead. A clear gaze, a purposeful chin, a confident swagger, stomach held in. Staying power, initiative, strokes of brilliance, success: all of these things map out the too transparent path of a too exemplary existence, constitute the sacrosanct images of the struggle for life. The white lies, the comforting illusions of all those who are running on the spot, sinking deeper into the mire, the lost illusions of the thousands left on society's scrap heap, those who arrived too late, those who put their suitcase down on the pavement and sat on it to wipe their brow. But you no longer need excuses, regrets,
nostalgia. You reject nothing, you refuse nothing.

You have ceased going forward, but that is because you weren't going forward anyway, you're not setting off again, you have arrived, you can see no reason to go any further: all it took, practically, on a day in May when it was too hot, was the untimely conjunction of a text of which you'd lost the thread, a bowl of Nescafé that suddenly tasted too bitter, and a pink plastic bowl filled with blackish water in which six socks were floating, this was all it took for something to snap, to turn bad, to come undone, and for the truth to appear in the bright light of day - but the light of day is never bright in the garret on Rue Saint-Honoré - this disappointing truth, as sad and ridiculous as a dunce's cap, as heavy as a Latin dictionary: you have no desire to carry on, no desire to defend yourself, no desire to attack.

The 89 page novel that follows is intense and at times deliberately repetitive, as the student

The identity of the narrator, who uses the 'tu' form in French, is unclear but is not meant to be definitely taken as the student talking to himself. In the film version, in which Perec was involved, the student was male but the narrative voice deliberately female, to provide this distancing, and Perec commented in an interview on the use of 'tu': “It’s a form that mixes up the reader, the character, and the author.”

The text is also, even more explicitly that A Story of the Sixties, influenced by others works including I believe Kafka and Melville (as mentioned), Dante (Inferno), Joyce (Ulysses), Diderot (Rameau's Nephew), Proust (Rememberance of Things Past), Sartre (Nausea), Isaak L. Peretz (Bontshe the Silent), Michaux (Miserable Miracle), Baudelaire, Lowry, Lamartine, Le Clézio, and Barthes among others - although this list has been compiled by (inferred/imagined by?) others including Bellos, Perec referring to a more restricted list. Chris Andrews' 1996 piece Puzzles and Lists: Georges Perec's "Un Homme qui dort" [MLN, Vol. 111, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1996), pp. 775-796 - to be found here] is a good overview of the discussion about the influences on the text. This was most explicit and obvious (even I, not a particularly close reader, noticed it) in the closing section of the novel, although Bellos's contention that "almost every sentence had been written before by somebody else" seems more contentious.

Perec himself wrote, in a letter to his German translator [the letter translated by Bellos although not included in this volume] that "it is sure to give you lots of headaches: I have in fact enlisted the support (often by distorting them) of a good number of authors, including Kafka, Melville, Dante, Joyce, etc. . . the most miraculous part of it being that you don't notice it at all." (which, as noted, is rather less true in the closing section).

The figure in this novel was to be repurposed in Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual as translated by Bellos) as Gregoire Simpson, the comparison to Kafka's Gregor Samsa rather clearer.

A Man Asleep is a strong work - 4 stars.

Overall 3.5 stars rounded to 3.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

When, earlier this month, I read Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, tr. Sophie Hughes, I noted in the author’s acknowledgments that he considered his novella a “tribute” to the first novella in this collection, and Goodreads friend Nick Grammos emphasized this by asking if I’d read Things, which I hadn’t.

But now I have, and the relationship between the two is as fascinating as each novella is alone. It is far too common for fictions to act as parasites to famous works of fiction, tributes yes, but since they are not equal works, in terms of their qualities, they seem to be more marketing than art. Latronico, as it turns out, stands on Perec’s shoulders and has produced a work that not only updates Things, but goes beyond it, especially in terms of the narrative voice and the lack of lists, which marred the Perec for me, along with the narrator’s commentary and the length (Latronico’s is shorter, perfectly so).

But, of course, one of the best things about Latronico’s novella comes straight out of Perec: it is the story of a couple rather than of the individuals that contemporary fiction is built upon. Other differences that favor the Latronico: the couple is more representative and the milieu more international (the Perec is very French; Latronico hardly Italian, not I think to make the novel more palatable in translation, but to keep current with European culture); and the Latronico couple is, like today’s young, more focused on experiences than on things, and experiences are, at least to me, more interesting.

Perec has to be given extra kudos for being the original, but it is wonderful how Latronico built on Perec, and not to make his fiction more marketable: it’s not even mentioned on the cover of the English translation. Speaking of translation, Bellos’ translation of the Perec is excellent, a joy to read.

[Oleksandr Fediienko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Перек специфічний. І трохи безнадійний.
Усі намагання персонажів щось змінити були марними, в обох творах.
Особливо про другий твір:
Не можу повністю зарілейтитися, але деякі фрагменти було боляче читати. Про те, що ти просто не вмієш жити тощо.
Загалом я не дуже зрозумів причину цієї раптової зміни. Хіба що Перек і не збирався її сильно пояснювати. Десь на початку в мене виникло питання: ок, він втратив опору, а чи буде він шукати іншу? І вже залежно від цієї нової опори я б зрозумів, чого раніше бракувало герою. Але цього не відбувається. Він просто замінює життя на його імітацію. Може, в цьому і є сенс - він уже не шукає нічого нового в цьому світі. Але мені ця думка теж болить, тому я і шукаю інше пояснення.

[Sean Canty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two good times to read this would be during a pandemic or while riding a train. I read it on the train.

[Bert Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, browsing at one of my favorite (now gone) East Village booksellers -St Marks Bookstore- I cradled Perec’s, Life: A User’s Manual, yet decided to leave it there on the shelf. A memory of lost opportunity that instilled an ongoing interest in Georges Perec’s singular style- an anthropological fiction illuminating the bourgeois life experience in a Marxist context.

A few years back I thoroughly enjoyed his, Brief Notes on the Art of Arranging One’s Books, an amusing collection of newspaper and magazine pieces in which I sited:

Besides wishing to "arrange my books once and for all" he would also "like to get drunk with Malcolm Lowry" before his time ends. He explores the arbitrary structure of the alphabet, organizing one's library, and the general dearth of verbs to describe discreet actions in various languages:

"The Americans also have a verb that means 'to live in the suburbs and work in the town': to commute. But they don't, any more than we do, have one which would mean: 'drink a glass of white wine with a friend from Burgundy, at the Cafe des Deux-Magots, around six o'clock on a rainy day, while talking about the non-meaningfulness of the world, knowing that you have just met your old chemistry teacher and that next to you a young woman is saying to her neighbour: 'You know, I showed her some in every colour!'

So, a few months ago, my mind perked up reading a book review of the well-received Italian novel, Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico who claimed he had modeled his book on Perec’s, Things, A Story of the Sixties. This was all I needed to revisit Perec and also the self-defining decade in which I entered adulthood.

Here Perec writes about a young couple Jerome and Sylvie who drop college and become pollsters for a marketing agency selling products from soap to fashion. They find an apartment in which they become enamoured with collecting their own possessions and enjoy socializing with other liked minded hipsters who eat, drink and discuss the coming trends in the arts and commerce. It is not long before their desires outstrip their means, and they find themselves caught up in the rat race of middle-class aspirations.
By the age of 40 they arrive at a critical stage now aware that they can move forward up the management ladder or entertain a fantasy to get away from it all via relocating to the countryside.

“Treading water or worse as ageing Bohemians in polo-necks and cord trousers.”

“You cannot live in a frenzy for very long. In a world which promised so much and delivered nothing, the tension was too great. They ran out of patience.”

So off they go. Selling off their possessions they sign up for teaching positions in Tunisia but after one school semester they are bored, disillusioned, and decide to go back to Paris. Which only promises a continuing ride on the merry go round of materialism.

It is quite fascinating that the dramaturge Perec creates has not grown old and very much describes the deurbanization many young families in Brooklyn have decided to embark on (and one, too, i travelled as a young hippie along the Trans Canadian Highway, SF and Woodstock). This bourgeois tale is still complicated, and I am sure served Latronico well in his novel, Perfection.

Perec ends his tale with an enigmatic quote form Karl Marx:

“The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true; the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result.”

At some point I look forward to reading Latronico’s piece and compare the two.

[Eric Boles · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will open the book and begin reading, word by word. At first they won’t mean anything to you, the sentences, the paragraphs, the white spaces separating them. There will be a coffee at your side, you will be reading in bed with one leg crossed on top of the other. You will read to the end of the first page and flip it, disinterested. The narrator has not yet captivated you.

For now they’re just listing things. The things of Paris in the 60s, of an impoverished student, the things of a life. Cigarette butts, and empty cups of espresso, worn out books on brown bookshelves, the imitation Renoir hung lopsided over the bed-frame. The lamps turned off, the light spilling in through the window, the tiles on the ceiling, the pots scattered lazily across the small kitchen on the other side of the room. A pair of socks floating idly by in the washbasin. Nuts, bolts, the metals of dull knives, the pants and the shirt-collars lying neglected on the floor beneath an old set of rags and newspapers. The narrator will start listing sounds.

Your shallow breathing, the coughing of your room-mate, his slow shuffle, from one side of the room back to the other, which you have come to expect like the dripping of a faucet. The din of voices and cars sounding out beneath your apartment building, down on the street. Talking about something, to each other, going somewhere important, not going anywhere at all. The faint echoes of horns and whistles. The silence, further up, struggling against the noise surrounding you on all sides as you try to read, to flip the page, to move your eyes back and forth across the space.

The narrator will tell you that these sounds have ceased to interest you. That your obligations for the day have been abdicated because you have forgotten properly how to live. The light will continue to be blue coming in through your apartment window. Your room-mate will cough, your socks will float in the bin. You will be reading on your bed and the narrator will tell you so. A fly will buzz around the room. You will not know whether or not they’re right, whether or not you should keep reading.

The narrator suggests you go for a walk, and you listen to them. You stand up from the bed, walk into your slippers, cross the room. You leave the building, hold the silver railing on the way down the dirty stairs, taking them one by one, listening to the sounds of other people being alive. You walk outside and you are in Paris. People ride by you on the street with bicycles, children wander around, laughing, pushing each other, copies of today’s newspaper are strewn across the pavement stones.

You walk past many advertisements, towards the cafe. The buildings will be tall and brown on either side of you and the passing throngs will be full of people because it is summer. You will wander what the hour is.

When you get to the cafe and sit down you will order the same thing you always do, though you have never been here before. From the chair at the brown table you will observe the street-people, the waiters, the walkers, the people obviously sweating profusely in their clothes, the people hurrying somewhere, the people going nowhere at all. The people walking by themselves, alone, or with others of all sorts, the people wearing hats, the tall people and the short ones that you will never meet, the people of medium height, the people that you will never see ever again, the people that you see walking by you every single day.

The colors and senses of the cafe on the street will spread themselves out before you in a fan: the advertisements for a new toothpaste, the cinema down the road, screening a new film, the street signs, the lamp-posts, the corners which turn off to places you never go. The narrator will tell you that you are not interested in these things anymore, that you ae not where you’re supposed to be. That nowhere is where you’re supposed to be. You will get the feeling that the life of color is flickering gray back and forth before your eyes.

After you finish your coffee you will get up and keep walking, you don’t know where. The narrator will tell you the names of the streets, in a language you don’t understand. Pigeons will light off the rooftops overhead, winging away, and cats will slink out from the alleyways at your side. You will be surrounded by people that are already dead. You will turn again, the feet with a mind of their own, and head up the long stone staircase leading to the foot of a park that you have now entered. A runner will pass by at speed, and disappear out of sight down the path. The clouds will be making cloud-shapes in the sky.

The park is not big, it will be dotted around with a few trees, a few people, as interested or disinterested as you in everything there is to offer. A horn sounds. A bus passes down the street behind you, going nowhere. You will sit down again with the book and open it up, beneath a tree in the shade, you were wise to have brought it with you. You will continue reading it.

After a minute you will get bored and start examining the dirt around you, the grasses, the tops of the roots taking shelter above ground. You will examine the bark on the trunk, the whole bole of the tree, its twigs, its branches, the leaves hanging off the branches, the veins running the length of every leaf, every vein of every leaf hung suspended off every swooping branch.

At some point, you know not when, you will be wandering again. Streets you don’t know, with an objective you can’t form into words in your mind. You will pass the fruit vendors and the vendors offering meat and cross over the metro stations and past the empty bus-stops, you will stop and purchase some cigarettes at a grocery store, though you will not smoke them.

Women will pass around you, and children, and men, with long faces and with short ones, ones lined with stiff years and softened with the easy ones, eyes obviously tired and obviously awake, brows furrowed, brows relaxed, the noses protruding out too far, not far enough. People wearing shirts with buttons or with no buttons, over pants or shorts or tucked in, treading in shoes worn down to the soles or in ones just recently purchased. The light will be getting darker now. It will begin lightly to rain. You will keep wandering the maze streets of Paris.

The narrator tells you that all these things have bored you now, but it is the boredom of someone half-smiling. They tell you the things in exhaustive lists which have ceased to matter to you anymore. The street-cobbles, the hills and the slopes, the littered trash, the tops of the buildings in the distance, the breaks in the road, the smells of food, of coffee, of meat, of cigarettes. Of life in the streets. The door-ways, the tunnels, the arches, the support-beams, the screws, the chairs, the stools, the tables, the seats, the benches, the birds who sing, the insects who chirp, the people who talk loudly to one another, right next to you, all the senseless thoughts racing through your empty head.

For a while you will believe them, because you have not yet caught onto their game. Your feet will start to hurt, and your calves. You will start to agree with the narrator, more and more. The rain will be falling harder now, as you walk, and you will start to get angry. You will get angry with the job you left behind and the few coins jingling around in your pocket, you will get angry at your stomach, at the people all around who do not notice you, who will not notice you, who will never take notice of you. At the shops that are open and the shops that are closed, you will get angry. At your shoes, your socks, your cheap pants and your cheap shirt, all stuck miserably to your body in the wet, you will begin to get angry. You will start to be angry with the narrator who has lulled you into their world, into their wandering and their walking, their observation, their endless lists to the point where things do not matter anymore, and it will not matter that you are angry with them.

In your anger you will sit down on a bench in Place Cliche. You will be seated in front of the Seine, flowing slowly with its filth. You will be almost done with the book. The one that does not matter, the one that told you nothing matters and listed out forever all the things that don’t and all the ways in which they do not. Cars, subways, aeroplanes, food shops, cafes, postage stamps, grocers, tailors, places of lewd business, insurance dealers, stock brokers, advertising agencies, banks, schools, libraries, scholars, nonprofits and for-profits, homes, hovels, garrets, apartments, places of permanent residence, of temporary residence, of no residence at all for the stifling mobs of people crowding around you on all sides as you sit on the park bench trying to read your book. It is still raining and it does not matter to you. Wheels, metal, pieces of plastic, of wood, of silver, tin cups, pots and pans, irons, cast irons, ovens, nails, clocks, clocks on the wall, schedules, the newspaper, the articles printed in the newspaper, the words which comprise in mind-numbing variations the same articles always printed in the newspaper in the same ways.

You keep reading because you are almost at the end when it hits you. The exhaustive lists, the words, all the mundane things of a life, all the variations of the things which don’t matter, the cough of a room-mate, the socks floating in the wash-basin. That all of these things do not matter is incompatible with their having been remembered, recorded, redeemed. That all of these things add up to a life which does not matter to you is impossible with the urge to sign your name that you have been here before, that you have heard these things, that you have seen them, that you have lived, that you have cleaned your socks. To scribble on the cave walls in order to make a mark. To sign against the void. All the things which did not matter to them but which they recorded, meticulously, desperately, time and time again, in a stylized manner, taking great care with every sentence, every paragraph, every word and every white space in between, every list, every item on every list, driven by the desperate desire to prove to themselves: I was here, I lived this, I mattered. My name is Georges Perec, I was in Paris, I have existed.

You finish the book and the ennui and the anger have become embarrassed into the boredom with a half-smile of a man who lived and died decades ago, on the other side of the world. The things you would have ignored today at your job, in your bed, or in between the places that you normally walk, all the little things that you have forgotten about and that you will forget about again, right now present themselves to you, for a fleeting moment, as they truly are. And you are eternally grateful.

Resting the closed book on your knee in the park bench by the Seine you decide you will write a review for this book on Goodreads. For the book which in its warm ingratitude made you desperately thankful to be alive, to be reading, to be walking around, to be encountering things. You are happy again. “You are waiting, on Place Clichy, for the rain to stop falling.”

[Adam Floridia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Things: A Story of the Sixties gets a very strong 4/5. Review forthcoming--first I've got to get right into A Man Asleep!


A Man Asleep gets a very "eh" 2/5. Further, I'm particularly mad at it for two additional reasons: 1) it isn't a separate book (I mean I couldn't find a separate publication of these two anywhere!), so these two books only count as one book on my reading challenge! (Yeah, I actually think about stuff like that, and yeah it burns my biscuits.) 2) I was so jazzed up after reading Things: A Story of the Sixties that I probably could have written a pretty good review: you read A Man Asleep and you become less enthused. You suddenly lose passion for what you once enjoyed. You drink some nescafe. You keep reading the book and thinking that it reminds you a bit of Beckett and you don't really enjoy most of his stuff. You find it tolerable, but tedious and repetitive. You find it repetitive and tedious. You do kind of like that it's in the 2nd person, though. You thought that would be annoying, but it has its charm. Will you ever return to write a proper review of the book you actually liked? Only time will tell; "time would have had to stand still, but no-one has the strength to fight against time" (219).

Now I can't wait for Perec's "e" books to arrive in the mail; otherwise, I'll have to start Life: A User's Manual, and that's looong(ish). Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[Jeroen · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in my early twenties, I lived by myself in a huge, somewhat derelict building. It had two floors, three bedrooms, of which I left two empty. It was in a city in which I knew few people, and liked even fewer. I studied there, which amounted to about six hours of classes a week. I didn't do much else. I hardly read books, hardly went out to meet old friends. Instead, I walked. Aimlessly, fruitlessly; pointless walks to dismal places. Dismal walks to pointless places. At night, I couldn't sleep. The silence smothered me. Or, as Perec says: I stopped speaking and only silence replied. It was too much. I had to wait, basically sitting around in one empty room or another, for the sun to rise, for the birds to sing, for my neighbours to rise and go to work. I would sleep through the day, get up, walk around, sit through the night. It seemed like entire lifespans passed me by then. What it boiled down to, though, was merely a very long summer.

Yet, as in Perec's A Man Asleep, the indifference and emptiness of that summer did not arise out of nothing, did not come as a surprise. It was surrounded by more emptiness, less or more dense, more or less dense. I don't remember the day, or the week, or the month, but it must have been that summer, and there must have been a day indeed, when I too discovered, without surprise, that without mincing words, that I did not know how to live, and that I would never know. It might have been that summer, or a summer before, or after, it doesn't matter, that I watched the film version of A Man Asleep, watched - or glimpsed - it endlessly, bits and pieces, YouTubed segments, the hypnotic drone of the narrator's voice speeding up, lulling me from one nothingness into another. When those words, those italicised words above, came up, what I liked about them was the without surprise, the studied insouciance of that interjection, the lack of melodrama in it. There is a man sitting in a room, sitting on a bed, and he realises something. But this is no eureka moment. It is more like confirming what you knew all along, like the fifth replication of the outcome of some experiment. This man, sitting in a room, sitting on a bed, might just nod slightly, altogether imperceptibly, to himself.

What is so incredible about A Man Asleep is the pace, the endless enumeration of the same things, of walks, cinemas, bars, of turning left, turning right, turning left again, of sleeping and not sleeping. Short as the story is, it nevertheless endlessly doubles back upon its own tracks. Which is to say: its style mirrors its subject. The British band The Clientele does a similar thing in their music: their every song encapsulates the same thing, a haziness, a glimpse, a world where rain never pours but always drizzles, yet where skies never quite clear up either; a world, too, eternally observed from behind a window, at a remove, not quite there, a world seen through distorting reflections. As it happens, The Clientele has one song which perfectly accompanies A Man Asleep. It is called "Losing Haringey", and features a narrator who drifts aimlessly through nighttime suburban London ("In those days, there was a kind of fever that pushed me out of the front door...", it begins). There is too, as in Perec, a finely-calibrated description of surroundings, an oddly imbalanced focus on the things that we usually gloss out:

I found myself wandering aimlessly to the west, past the terrace of chip and kebab shops and laundrettes near the tube station. I crossed the street, and headed into virgin territory - I had never been this way before. Gravel-dashed houses alternated with square 60s offices, and the wide pavements undulated with cracks and litter. I walked and walked, because there was nothing else for me to do, and by degrees the light began to fade.

This endless return to one question, one probe, reminds me a little of the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, who claimed that his novels were like sculptures that you could walk around. His most famous work, Dictionary of the Khazars, is supposed to be read like a hypertext, jumping back and forth between entries, but with the catch that all entries are essentially telling the same story; it does not have the breadth and scope of a real dictionary. It is a kind of trick of the light, the unknowable, true meaning fractured into a kaleidoscopic panorama.

* * *

But all of that was then, which suggests that now must be now, and somehow different from then. As I read these two novellas, I couldn't help but notice that I drifted against Perec's chronology, from his second novella into his first. Somewhere along the line I got a job, a decent little job, a temporary little job that for all intents and purposes feels pretty solid, feels pretty ongoing, feels pretty endless. I sleep relatively sound, live relatively regular hours. I vacate and vacillate behind the telly sometimes, like everyone else. Finally like everyone else. I might still have vague plans to the future, but they are forever indiscriminate; they exist in a meaningless void, side-by-side, I could take or leave them, probably. Like the couple in Things, I too could up and leave, could go to a Sfax of my own, and if I did I would go for exactly the same inane reasons as our protagonists do: because it would bear the semblance of change, because I would like to believe that a different city means a different life. Such vague plans not only provide me with little hope, but they also prevent me from putting down roots. I am somehow still in Perec's other book too, in that "blessed parenthesis" he mentions somewhere, the bubble that time forgot. Neither coming from somewhere nor going anywhere:

For Christ’s sake, our young lad thinks, am I going to have to spend my days behind these glass walls instead of going for walks in flowery meadows? Am I going to catch myself hoping the night before each promotion exercise? Am I going to calculate, connive, champ my bit, me, who used to dream of poetry, of night trains, of warm sandy beaches? And, taking it mistakenly to be a consolation, he falls into the trap of hire-purchase. Then he is caught, well and truly caught. All he can do is to gird up his patience. Alas, when he gets to the end of his troubles, our young man is no longer quite so young, and, to cap his misfortunes, it can even seem to him that his life is behind him, that it consisted only of his striving and not of what he strove for, and even if he is too cautious, too sensible - his slow climb has given him plenty of experience - to dare to say such things to himself, it will none the less be true that he will be forty, and straightening out his home and his weekend place and his children's education will have filled more than adequately the few hours he will have been able to spare from his work...

(...and you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself... how did I get here?...)

Hire-purchase of course being the perfect metaphor, a trap indeed, but also a way of life, a kind of purgatory on earth, a hoverboard for the soul. Hire-purchase is a way of writing off the currency of your lifeblood without any returns, without even a receipt, and an efficient vehicle in which to speed semi-consciously to and into mid-life. We'll wake you up when we're there, someone might say.

In "Losing Haringey", the narrator walks on until he sets himself down on some park bench, only to suddenly find that he has wandered into an old photograph. The two realities somehow merge:

I was still sitting on the bench, but the colours and the planes of the road and horizon had become the photo. If I looked hard, I could see the lines of the window ledge in the original photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the silhouetted edge of a grass verge.

Of course the inevitable happens, and the narrator experiences a kind of Proustian collapse:

Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back - to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother’s car. All gone, gone forever.

Nostalgia, the past - they are curious things. We speak of intervening disasters, wrong turns, we think there are trajectories between where we were then and where we are now. But if pressed, they become hard to pinpoint. I don't quite know how I spiritually drifted from A Man Asleep to Things, and/or where exactly on the Perec-spectrum I currently am. The book as I have it, the two novellas combined, feels like the Before and After of something important, some great event that nonetheless never transpired. There has been no intervening disaster. The arrow of life has moved forward, yes, but I could not catch it in motion in any one singular frame. And yet here I am.

Almost near the end of A Man Asleep, Perec describes one of the walks as feeling "like a messenger delivering a letter with no address." This is pretty apposite. What keeps me going is the idea that there might be something (of whatever kind) out there, that the world is too big to rule out any surprises, positive or negative. But to be honest, unless you are Jonathan Safran Foer, the odds of delivering a letter with no address in a big, big world, are pretty slim.

[Marlene Ito · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was gifted to me by Alicia for my 22nd birthday, mailed to me from Paris. It encapsulates the limbo of twenties, thirties, (maybe stretching beyond those ages now that uncertainty seems to be the feeling permeating most readily in the world)- the time of longing, of preoccupation with objects, the latest fads, of being unsure - of what you want and who you are; your place in the world. I thought it was written incredibly lyrically, but consequently sometimes felt like the long teased out sentences meant I lost what was actually being stated (but this may be the fault of translation). Definitely bleak, but that’s what I go for.

[julieta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me pareció demasiado frío. Supongo que es una especie de caricatura, o algo, porque te cuenta sobre personas lejanas, de quienes en todo momento habla en plural, haciendo cosas con las que evidentemente no está de acuerdo. Tiene frases lindas y trabajadas como suele tener, pero de emoción queda medio nulo.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of Things here

My review of A Man Asleep here

[Volodymyr Rositskyi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Думаю ця книга роки два тому мені б дуже сподобалося, але зараз я то все читаю і звучить якось безсенсово.

Мені вже незрозумілі проблеми головних героїв