Things: A Story of the Sixties

No-one does introspective angst quite like the French.  That may sound xenophobic or like a lazy stereotype; but it’s true and I think I can prove it.  I’m going to veer away from standard form for the next couple of blogs, if only because I’ve read two List Books in a row by the same author (blame Vintage Classics and their decision to combine two novellas into one book).  This time it’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, by Georges Perec and, although my next read is also him I am going to deal with the two stories separately. 

Things (to remove the post-hoc subtitle) is a pretty important book, according to its introduction, at least.  It’s the first novel of French writer Perec, who would go on to write other List featured gems such as the wonderfully titled Life: A User’s Manual and famed novel-without-the-letter-e, Avoid/ A Void.  The latter of these I find particularly impressive, as considering the French for “I” this wipes out the ability write in the first person almost entirely.  But back to Things; it’s more than just a prize winning novel that launched the career of an important writer.  It’s also the kind of book that captures a 1960s Parisian zeitgeist perfectly.  And it’s bloody good too.

The book itself reminds me strongly of the French New Wave of cinema.  Being written in the Sixties, it would have been at around the same time that Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were really in the swing of ridding French cinema of its certain tendencies and portraying reality.  According the story is fairly simple.  Couple Jérôme and Sylvie are two young market researchers who are in pursuit of something better in Paris.  Their lives revolve around cigarettes, nights out with friends and possessions, while they lament the fact that they have no money.  Eventually, they give up France for Sfax in Tunisia, but this does not last either and they soon return.  The novella finishes with a pessimistic epilogue of a cookie-cutter future for the pair that drips with inevitability.

Jérôme and Sylvie themselves are pretty incidental.  They are characters moved by outside events rather than ones that have any discernible effect on the plot.  The epilogue shows this; their lives are mapped out for them, no matter what their actual desires may be.  Perec also has a wonderful tendency to focus on their things, rather than the couple.  They are not introduced by name until around the third chapter, long after their possessions and one of the stand-out bits of the book is a section about their apartment before they move out, finally empty of their clutter and once again desirable.  Perec gives the feeling that Jérôme and Sylvie are transitory and the only things with permanence are just that: things. 

Part of the reason that Things has really struck a chord with me is that I am at the same point in my life as Jérôme and Sylvie and I can see my life going the same way.  I’m not sure how, but I appear to have fallen into something that could well be described as a career and that maps out paths for me that Perec seems to be suggesting I will end up taking, no matter my view on the thing.  In Things, Perec doesn’t suggest anything as trite as fate takes over, he just understands how the majority of lives run and although there are subtle (and not so subtle) differences between Paris of the 1960s and Norwich of the 2010s, the general course of a human life hasn’t changed terribly.  And Perec is predicting a mediocre future.

Join me next time for the introspection of Georges Perec part deux: A Man Asleep.