Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep

Things is two thematically-related novels by Georges Perec in one volume. In A Story of the Sixties , Jerome and Sylvie, a young, upwardly mobile couple lust for the good life, caught between the fantasy of “the film they would have liked to live” and the reality of life’s daily mundanities. The nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs “to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wande...