Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep
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One couple consumed by things. One man liberated by indifference. Two haunting explorations of the things we own--and the things that own us.
In Things: A Story of the Sixties, Jerome and Sylvie, a young, upwardly mobile couple lust for the good life, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.
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 something unexpected.
With the American publication of Life: A User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was recognized in the United States as one of the century's most innovative writers. Things: A Story of the Sixties is accessible, sobering, and deeply involving. Each distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition and displays his rare comic talent, detachment, and compassion.
Georges Perec
Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix M�dicis and established Perec's international reputation.
More by Georges Perec
David Bellos
Translated by
David Bellos is the author of a number of award-winning literary biographies and the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005. He lives in New Jersey and teaches French, Italian, and Comparative literature at Princeton University.
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