A review by zoracious
Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep by Georges Perec
4.0
[Review on Things only - for now:]
Things puts a new spin on the whole "The things you own end up owning you" principle. The couple at the outskirts of this story (I was going to say 'center of this story' but really they are both central and peripheral) at times knowingly buy in to the belief that they are deliberately purchasing things or conducting market research on things knowing they themselves do so with an end to fill a void to provide pleasure and/or status. But at other times, they seem to find themselves lost, unable to find this joy from the objects around them, or to find the right kind of objects to fill their emptiness.
Perec doesn't present his story with any kind of dialogue (unless you count the epilogue). Instead he presents his story as a kind of catalog of description, accounts and inventories of things, people, and activities. It is sometimes tiresome but more often than not a bit absorbing in a social commentary/voyeurism sort of way, and often beautiful and very visual. Probably the only problem I had with his 'message' is that the trip to Sfax is almost a cop-out: Why are we required to leave our country in order to find change or to seek out an answer? He salvages this by suggesting that leaving is just another form of loss that the characters experience.
The book has a taste of optimism but is mostly dreary and heartbreaking. There is beauty to be found, but Jerome and Sylvie seem to discover it only as it is leaving them (or they are leaving it).
There is a lot to discover in this book that make it a worthwhile read, a lot of moments that, even though this was written about the sixties, resonate in our consumerist culture and in our desire to find ourselves through the things we buy and with which we surround ourselves.
Note: I read Things for a class in conjunction with Lipovetsky's Hypermodern Times. Even though neither were written for the other, there is great value to reading them together.
Things puts a new spin on the whole "The things you own end up owning you" principle. The couple at the outskirts of this story (I was going to say 'center of this story' but really they are both central and peripheral) at times knowingly buy in to the belief that they are deliberately purchasing things or conducting market research on things knowing they themselves do so with an end to fill a void to provide pleasure and/or status. But at other times, they seem to find themselves lost, unable to find this joy from the objects around them, or to find the right kind of objects to fill their emptiness.
Perec doesn't present his story with any kind of dialogue (unless you count the epilogue). Instead he presents his story as a kind of catalog of description, accounts and inventories of things, people, and activities. It is sometimes tiresome but more often than not a bit absorbing in a social commentary/voyeurism sort of way, and often beautiful and very visual. Probably the only problem I had with his 'message' is that the trip to Sfax is almost a cop-out: Why are we required to leave our country in order to find change or to seek out an answer? He salvages this by suggesting that leaving is just another form of loss that the characters experience.
The book has a taste of optimism but is mostly dreary and heartbreaking. There is beauty to be found, but Jerome and Sylvie seem to discover it only as it is leaving them (or they are leaving it).
There is a lot to discover in this book that make it a worthwhile read, a lot of moments that, even though this was written about the sixties, resonate in our consumerist culture and in our desire to find ourselves through the things we buy and with which we surround ourselves.
Note: I read Things for a class in conjunction with Lipovetsky's Hypermodern Times. Even though neither were written for the other, there is great value to reading them together.