The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 January 2005
by Georges Perec
This is a short, troubling existential novel about one man's sudden abandonment of his "life", such as it is, for an existence in which he endeavors to make everything mean as little as possible. The book reads like much of existential literature, with its nameless protagonist wandering aimlessly through his life after waking up on the day of a university exam and deciding rather to stay home and stare at a bowl in which his socks are soaking. If this seems to induce an eye roll, that's to be expected. It does seem that Perec is getting his cue from Sartre, or Camus, or even Dostoyevsky and any one of a dozen other similar writers. Perec places his own personal stamp on the nameless man's story, and it is said that some of this is his own personal experience. The man wanders the streets of Paris, home to his parents and back again to the city. Perec's descriptions of the streets are acute and often read like a list that brings the scenery to life. But what life? The protagonist is trying to remove all meaning from his life, as if this is a kind of depressed living suicide. He seems to relish the act of imparting emptiness to his own existence. This is, perhaps, a common ailment amongst literary college students, and most of them snap out of it, eventually. Indeed, Perec's student just begins to see a light at the end of his tunnel, realizing that futility for the sake of futility is somewhate futile in itself. The book is written in the second person, so Perec gives the story a feeling of the personal, as if he had crept into the reader's head. It is an unsettling technique. The book is good, but, fortunately, quite short. Such an existence is hard to endure, despite the freshness of Perec's approach. It was made into a movie in 1974, but one can hardly imagine it.
(A Man Asleep was recently republished by David Godine in a single volume with Perec's Things.)
Also by Perec: [Life: A User's Manual] [Things]