George Perec's 'Things: A Story of the Sixties' is a tale of consumerism and the pursuit of happiness in Paris of the nineteen-sixties. Perec's first novel, which won him the Prix Renaudot in 1965, became the cult novel of a generation. It follows young market researchers Jerome and Sylvie, as they desperately try to acquire the 'right' things. Hunting through flea markets and country auctions for 'a cashmere twinset woven by a blind Orkney crofter', 'glasses that asked to be drunk from'. Dashing across Paris to the window of some obscure, select boutique to see 'one of those tiny, astonishingly flat cases in slightly grainy black leather...which seem the very quintessence of lightning visits to New York or London'. They would have liked to be rich, 'their lives would have been an art of living.' They felt they would have known how to spend their money in the right way, buying the right things. Their enjoyment of life is driving by ownership of these material 'things'. The search for them is depicted as half mad, frantic. A desperate race that will only leave them unsatisfied and bitter.
There's so much in this book that is resonant with life today, particularly over the last acquisitive decade. So much of it reminds me of the atmosphere, real or imagined, of living in London in the latter part of the noughties, on the brink of the economic collapse, and of the heady days of unstoppable possession in Ireland's boom.
It is almost a painful read, sad and ridiculous and so very true.
Find it in Vintage Classics in Hodges Figgis, Dawson St, Dublin.
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