Les Choses Reading Order

Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties, 1965) by Georges Perec won the Prix Renaudot in the year of its publication and immediately established Perec as one of the most original voices of his generation. The novel — very short, under one hundred pages — follows Jérôme and Sylvie, a young Parisian couple working as market researchers in the early 1960s, whose entire inner life is organised around their desire for the things they cannot afford: the apartment they dream of (described in the conditional tense, as an elaborate catalogue of beautiful objects), the lifestyle they see around them, the freedom that money would provide. The novel is sociological in its method — Perec was deeply influenced by Roland Barthes's Mythologies and by the emerging consumer society of post-war France — and merciless in its satire: Jérôme and Sylvie's desire is entirely legitimate and entirely futile, their unhappiness entirely of their own making and entirely structural. Perec uses the conditional and imperfect tenses with extraordinary precision to distinguish between what the couple wants, what they have, and what they do, and the subtle modulation between these tenses is one of the novel's central technical achievements. Les Choses belongs alongside Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale as the French novel of unsatisfied bourgeois desire — but where Flaubert's Frédéric is defeated by history, Jérôme and Sylvie are defeated by their own consumer imagination.