A review by jackflagg
Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep by Georges Perec

4.0

Perec is a master of finding beauty in everyday life and dissecting the mundane and banal into its fundamental particles. These are two novellas about the struggles of freedom, about finding meaning in a meaningless world. In the modern age, when social media just exacerbates anxiety and FOMO, when it's easy to compare yourself to others and find yourself overwhelmed with choices and possibilities, it's important to be reminded that these are normal human experiences, that it's not unusual to be confronted with this gap between expectations and reality.

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Things is a universal story of the middle-class, the reasonably paid, the reasonably educated and reasonably well adjusted. At the surface, it seems to be only a story about materialism and consumerism, but look at it deeper and it's also an extension of (or a response to) the existentialist writings of philosophers such as Sartre or Camus. Materialism is only a symptom, not an ailment. Take someone who is poor and struggles with money: they will find it hard to aspire to greater things, to actively yearn for anything else but balance and stability. But give that same person a better job, a new setting, a decent living, and you'll see they quickly realise they're still not too happy, they're not content. Their situation could be better, maybe a bit more comfortable, a tad more fulfilling and so on. Sartre wrote about this in Perec's time - having the freedom to do anything is at the same time the biggest relief and the biggest burden one can have.

The paths they were following, the values they were gradually adopting, their outlook, their desires and their ambitions, it must be said, did indeed sometimes all feel desperately empty. They knew nothing that was not precarious or puzzling. Yet this was their life, it was the source of unsuspected experiences elating beyond intoxication, it was something hugely, intensely open.

What do you do with all that freedom? You have the freedom to choose everything in your life - from the soap in your bathroom, to the way you spend your free time and up to the path your life will take. Will you pick lemon or lavender? Will you have a comfortable week-end or one filled with adventures? Will you pick a life in arts or a career in business? You're able to choose so much about your destiny that you come to an impasse. You realise choosing is hard. It's hard to pick only one lane, it's hard to find the courage to choose only one life to live to the fullest because of the possibility - no, the certainty - that you'll either go on that path and turn back, regretting you have ever started, or you'll go as far as you can and realise you're still not happy, you still want something else, something more.

Impatience, thought Jérôme and Sylvie, is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, etc., they realised they would not have the strength to wait. Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what are commonly called intellectuals. For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership.

Naturally, you realise that the ones who are rich will find it easier to navigate these different paths, so if you're not careful you might make it all about money, you might start to think only in materialistic terms, you'll dream of getting rich, you'll think that you might become happier by buying this or spending your cash on that... This never works. It's not about money, or at least it doesn't have to be.
Camus would say that this eternal struggle is enough to fill a man's heart, but of course this is easier said than applied. :)

But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.

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Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs. You are patient and you are not waiting, you are free and you do not choose, you are available and nothing arouses your enthusiasm.

A Man Asleep is another novella about many things. It could just be about dreaming, ignorance or depression, if you want to interpret it that way. But this simply explores the theme of apathy and indifference, and that can be either a choice, a consequence or a symptom.

It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know.

This is a truly subjective novella. There is no separation there, the author simply uses the character of the man to pontificate and expand on the different aspects of indifference. But again, Perec manages to dig deep into a major theme by dissecting the mundane and the commonplace. He is an astute observer of the human nature and he does not shy away from pointing out flaws and superficialities.

The orderliness of your room. The regularity of your timetable. You impose childish constraints on yourself. [..] It is as if you were living with the constant dread that the slightest weakening of your resolution might, all at once, take you too far. It is as if you constantly needed to tell yourself: it is this way because I wanted it this way, I wanted it this way, otherwise I am dead.

Again, Perec seems to expand on the existentialist philosophy. We are able to choose so many things regarding our lives, so why do we choose the safe options, the boring options? Why do we so often choose to do nothing? Why do we choose not to live life to the fullest? To Perec, humans are like rats in a maze, but instead of pushing those pedals to get the most treats possible, humans just sit - we sit, we wonder, we sleep. Perec uses these characters to ask us: "Aren't these characters silly?" Yes, they really are, you answer, to which he takes you by the shirt collars and shakes you: "So why do you resemble them so!?"

But, poor Daedalus, there never was a maze. You bogus prisoner! your door was open all the time. There was no warden posted outside, no head-warden stationed at the end of the corridor, no Grand Inquisitor waiting at the garden gate. [...] It really does not matter whether you wish or you do not wish. You can play pinball or not play pinball, someone, in any case, will come along and slip a twenty centime coin into the slot.

Perec wants you to live without fear, without anxiety, without restraint. He wants you to stop waiting for a miracle, to stop fantasising about the extraordinary, to stop desiring without acting. He wants you to wake up.

Stop talking like a man in a dream.