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Georges Perec (1936-1982) was a French writer known for his innovations in form. Things: A Story of the Sixties was titled Les Choses: une histoire des années soixante in the original French. The novel is part of the Penguin Brief Encounters series, but my experience with the novel was not brief. Perec’s prose and his narrative style demand a bit more time and attention.
This is the story of a young Parisian couple - Jerome and Sylvie - who are trapped in a life of perpetually wanting material possessions they can’t quite afford and are yet unwilling to submit to a life of drudgery (as they see it) to acquire these luxuries. They value their freedom and choose their work accordingly - which is mostly conducting marketing surveys on a freelance basis - but then they go through bouts of dissatisfaction with their actual living circumstances as against the ideal built up in their heads. They want the effortless taste of the wealthy, and yet even this sensibility, seemingly within reach, ultimately eludes them. They want to be rich, but they want this to manifest without gruelling effort on their part (they dream of inheritances, or finding a burglar’s bag stuffed with cash). Despite all the images they conjure up of the perfect life, their own remains hollow and empty.
This is a short and unsparing look at a life driven by material desire, and was aimed at the consumer culture of the 1960s. Is it any less relevant today with the angst generated by the seemingly perfect and curated lives on social media? The tone of the novel is detached; there is no dialogue, nothing that gives us anything on Jerome and Sylvie other than what the narrator’s cool eye seems to be taking in. The first chapter - that sets the tone for much of what follows - reads like a high-end design catalogue, with a detailed description of the apartment that the couple imagines owning one day with its “fittings of gleaming brass”, “high ceilinged corridors”, “cherrywood bookcases”, “leather curtains”…..”it would be a haven of peace, a land of happiness”. You feel for this pair, forever chasing.