Sunday book pick: Novellas ‘Things’ and ‘A Man Asleep’ duel the beast of relentless consumerism
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“Fortune became their opium. It intoxicated them. They surrendered unreservedly to the delirium of their fantasies.”
Two of Georges Perec’s French novellas have been brought together in Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep – translations into English of Les Choses (1965) and Un homme qui dort (1967). They have been translated by David Bellos and Andrew Leak, respectively. Things was a runaway hit in French, making it to readers’ bookshelves as well as becoming prescribed reading at universities. The precise moment that it sought to capture – the 1960s – was especially recognised by the youth who were disproportionately affected by aggressive advertising of consumer luxuries. In comparison, A Man Asleep is a less popular work, which seems to capture the post-advertisement moment, where the accumulation of things no longer brings the joy that it once did. Interestingly, the characters in both novellas are in their early 20s.
Becoming consumers
In Things, considered a semi-autobiographical novella, we meet Jérôme and Sylvie, a 22-year-old couple living in Paris. They have dropped out of college and do door-to-door market research, a new field which will help advertisers and brands get as many customers as they possibly can. The questionnaires are simple but it is a physically demanding job. The couple knows that this is a stepping...