Georges Perec’s short novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (original title: Les choses: Une historie des années soixante), begins by outlining a group of young intellectuals in Paris in the early 60s.

The main characters, Sylvie and Jérôme, want more out of life than is within their economic reach.

They long for sun-drenched weekends at Côte d’Azur, vintage wines, luxury cars and closets full of elegant clothes.

Their lives take place in-between what they desire and what they can afford, as they are constantly preoccupied with longing for something better than what they currently have.

Perec demonstrates the distinction between being and wanting by differences in tense: Sylvie and Jérôme’s existence is described in the past tense, which is a stylistic trick that locks their actions into a space that is delimited and defined in time: something that has already been and thus can’t be changed.

This underscores the depressing limitations of their lives, in stark contrast to their dreams and desires of what they hope is to come, described in the future tense, as though their aspirations in itself were a force with the power to propel them through time, into a future where their every wish has been fulfilled.

 From a philosophical viewpoint, the book is an interesting example of how one’s self-image is tied to personal patterns of consumption.

By ascribing symbolic value to a specific commodity, we hope to achieve a kind of alchemy: transporting the values from certain object into our own lives, improving the quality of our life through the act of buying things.

The intense desire for consumption that Perec described as part of the 1960s culture is easily recognized also in contemporary times.

For many, the pace of the everyday is defined by how long the pay check lasts, as well as what it is spent on.

Perec was aware of this when he described his characters as trapped by their own desires.

Their inability to escape the allure of things appears, after only a few pages, as deeply claustrophobic.