Things

Les Choses is very noticeably a debut novel. Which isn't to say it's bad. As a sarcastic nod to Sartre (as if the title didn't give it away) it's not crap, as a satire of Mad Men-style materialism (it's subtitled a history of the 1960s, published in 1963) it's lost none of whatever sting it had - living in Stockholm's hipster neighbourhood in 2013, I know these people personally. (Hell, I probably am them.) And even if the satire is a bit too obvious, Perec delves beneath it - turning the never-ending litany of objects and what they symbolise into an almost mystical experience; it's not a sibling of Herzog's Fata Morgana, but definitely a distant cousin.

That said, it's not a nice novel by any stretch. Young Perec is ruth- and merciless in the way he eviscerates his characters... actually that's not correct; in order to eviscerate them he'd first have to flesh them out, and Jérome and Sylvie only exist as would-be consumers, defined only by what they want and cannot have (which we're told outright by the none-too-subtle narrator). It's a novel to admire, but unlike much of his later work, it sneers where it might have winked.