Things

This volume contains two short novels by Georges Perec. Though distinct in style and subject, the works mirror each other: Things explores fascination with material wealth, while A Man Asleep explores its opposite, radical indifference.

Things: A Story of the Sixties

The novel opens with an extended fantasy rendered entirely in the conditional tense and the second person. An unnamed narrator describes what an ideal home "would" look like: a high-ceilinged corridor leading to an elegant living room with leather sofas, bookcases, and carefully graded browns and ochres. The vision extends through a bedroom, a study, and a bright kitchen where mornings begin with toast and grapefruit. An unnamed "they" work only a few hours, dine with friends, and call this balance happiness.

The reality is starkly different. Jérôme, twenty-four, and Sylvie, twenty-two, are a young Parisian couple who would like to be rich but are trapped in an awkward middle position, neither wealthy nor truly poor. They live in a tiny two-room flat of roughly thirty-five square meters near the Jardin des Plantes. The courtyard is charming, but the interior is cramped and cluttered. A broken electrical point goes unrepaired for three years: They think only in terms of all or nothing.

Both are market researchers, having dropped out of university rather than face mediocre teaching posts in provincial towns. Their work consists of relentless consumer questioning, from vacuum cleaners to coal mine safety: "Nothing that was human was outside their scope" (33). The job introduces them to the world of consumer desire. They discover fashion, fine clothing, and the Flea Market, where they rummage for imported shirts and trinkets. Money creates new needs.

Jérôme and Sylvie belong to a circle of friends, almost all in advertising, who share tastes and habits. Their aspirations are shaped by L'Express, a weekly magazine they simultaneously despise and devour, whose images of comfortable living exceed their purchasing power. They come from lower-middle-class families with no inheritances to expect. Their pleasures are intense but fleeting: They drink at bars like Harry's New York Bar, host unsophisticated dinner parties, and haunt small cinemas. Moments of happiness, lingering after dinner or walking on crisp evenings, produce "an almost visceral pleasure" (53) that dissolves at the slightest false note.

A career crisis looms. Past thirty, employers expect permanent positions. Their friends accept staff jobs one by one; Jérôme and Sylvie judge them harshly while clinging to freelance freedom. Friendships fracture along economic lines. The Algerian War runs as a backdrop: They briefly join a local Anti-Fascist Committee, but their activism fades. The war's end brings only emptiness. They feel they have aged without having begun to live, hollow reflections of a consumer world that taunts them, "up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs" (72). Their circle disintegrates. They walk Paris at night, pressing their noses against shop windows, dreaming of inheritances and jackpots. A farming survey across rural France triggers surreal visions of abundance that swell into palaces and bonfires before collapsing. They open their eyes to the hum of a tape recorder, a tiny blot of poverty on a great sea of plenty.

By September 1962, they decide to flee. They accept teaching positions in Tunisia: Sylvie in Sfax, a small coastal city, and Jérôme at a primary school twenty-three miles away. In Sfax they find oppressive heat, dusty palms, and silence. They arrange their Paris belongings into a small island of warmth within a bare flat, but Sfax proves inscrutable and isolating. Jérôme cannot find work. Sometimes they go a week without speaking to anyone. From April they travel south but find only the same dreary streets and mineral emptiness. At Hammamet, they visit the magnificent house of an aging English couple, a paradise of lemon trees and peacocks, but the luxury no longer moves them. They have become exiles. Desire drains away.

The epilogue shifts to the future tense. Jérôme and Sylvie will return to Paris, but the same cramped flat and glowing shop windows will suffocate them. One day, the day they always knew would come, they will accept twin executive posts in advertising at a Bordeaux agency. They will repaint their flat and see it for the first time as they always wanted it, then leave it forever. They will have their chesterfield settee, fitted carpets, and silver cutlery. On the train to Bordeaux, the starched linen in the dining car will seem like a prelude to a sumptuous feast, "But the meal they will be served will be quite simply tasteless" (120). The novel closes with a quotation from Karl Marx: "The means is as much part of the truth as the result."

A Man Asleep

Written entirely in the second person, this companion novel addresses an unnamed protagonist as "you." It opens with a minutely observed description of the visual phenomena behind closed eyelids before shifting to the protagonist's garret room on Rue Saint-Honoré, where he sits half-dressed with a sociology textbook on his knees. On the day of his exam, he does not get up. It is not a decision but an absence of action. He imagines a ghostly double performing the day's duties. His seat remains vacant. He will study no more. Friends leave notes under his door; he reads and crumples them. He discovers, without surprise, that "you don't know how to live, that you will never know" (134), and senses this is not a sudden change but the unmasking of something always present.

He retreats to his parents' house in a small village near Auxerre, staying for months in near-silence: rereading childhood books, playing cards with his father, contemplating trees on afternoon walks. A tree asks nothing, demands no response. He reflects bitterly on conventional life's predetermined trajectory, every role prepared from infancy, every revolt anticipated, and rejects the pretense of carrying on. When rain comes and the village empties, he returns to Paris.

Back in his garret, he learns to last. He walks the streets, sits in cafés, watches the Seine, reads Le Monde with equal disinterest from front page to classifieds. He teaches himself transparency and indifference: how to eat the same meal every day until his palate registers nothing, how to become invisible. He achieves something approaching happiness, feeling "that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down" (171). He falls into repetitive rituals: playing patience all night, studying the ceiling's cracks for nascent shapes, listening through the partition wall to an unseen neighbor's sounds and constructing an elaborate fantasy of the neighbor's life. He imposes rigid discipline, a strict daily budget, fixed itineraries, childish constraints like not stepping on pavement cracks.

But unhappiness infiltrates gradually. He bites his nails until they bleed, plays pinball feverishly, drifts through cinemas, and frequents all-night cafés. The city becomes hostile. He encounters other solitary figures, "the monsters": outcasts, eccentric loners, and lonely drinkers who accost him and grab his arm. He recognizes them as his fellows. He realizes indifference was a lure: "solitude teaches you nothing" and "indifference teaches you nothing" (213). His neutrality is meaningless.

The protagonist acknowledges he is not dead, has not lost his mind, and bears no curse. He is merely alone, and all he ever did was drift around a city. Time has continued to flow. The narrative voice commands: "Stop talking like a man in a dream" (215). The final image places him at Place Clichy in the rain among thousands of others. He is no longer the nameless master of the world, no longer transparent. "You are afraid, you are waiting. You are waiting, on Place Clichy, for the rain to stop falling" (215), an ending poised between despair and the faintest gesture toward reengagement with the world.