Things & A Man Asleep
Thursday, January 31st, 2008 @ 05:11
Things: A Story of the ‘60
A Man Asleep
by Georges Perec (1965)
Containing Perec’s two-sides-of-the-same-coin novellas, both Things and A Man Asleep tell the stories of opposing youthful, spiralling indulgences in futile escape from life.
In Things, a couple of disillusioned students, Jérôme and Sylvie, dropped out and took a marketing research job, expecting the work to allow them enough room for freedom and youthful dilettantism, their longing for an escape from adult settling down. Quietly shamed and oppressed by their own political impassivity (or seemingly engaged pretensions, distractions?) during the Algerian War, they went away, applying for teaching positions in Tunisia, at the same time their futile attempts at running away foreshadows their eventual settling down, not without the tender resignation vague regrets found in other Perec’s stories. As fitting to the subtitle, A Story of the Sixties, Things is the story of the (early) 60’s generation, alienation, and youthful rebellion that went along with the rise of urbanism and consumerism of the era, as well as the political issues of Algerian war.
A Man Asleep, on the other hand, is told in the second person, directly addressing and speaking for the reader, and yes, Perec himself in analysing and picking apart the life of the protagonist, a 25-year-old student overcome by the common malady of the futility and pointlessness of life. While Jérôme and Sylvie runs from life by desperate external search, the student (”you”) withdraws to the inside, refusing to learn or to take any part in life, simply drifting, not knowing how to live, knowing that he (we?) will never know. He reads all the time but the words do not register, he goes to the cinema, watching films he hardly remembers, he wanders around like a somnambulist. He tries to impose order on his life — little schedules, structures, but in the end, he knows that “indifference is futile,” and he is slowly waking up.
Although certainly falling short from Perec’s later works, I do have a certain weakness, a sentimental hang-up in my wistful identifications to isolated, melancholic individuals, and as cliched as the vision/story is, Perec presents the story nicely, short and charming enough of a dose to soothe youthful nostalgia without being ponderous or overdramatic.
