George Perec Character Analysis Essay

George Perec was often called the greatest innovator of form of his generation. His best-selling novel Les Choses: une histoire des années soixante is centered around the lives of Jérôme and Sylvie, who are disillusioned students that dropped out and acquired positions in the field of opinion polling and market research. Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, essayist, and member of the Oulipo group, a loose gathering of French writers and mathematicians that used constrained writing techniques in their works. He was orphaned at an early age: his mother died in a concentration camp and his father died as a soldier early in the Second World War. George Perec writes Things in part from experience: he did spend time in market research …show more content…
Perec transitions here to explaining their increasing anxieties arising from uncertainty with money and employment. The subsequent paragraphs describe how “you can never remain just a market researcher for very long” and that employers in advertising often declined to employ older persons and those who have never been “on the staff”. Jerome and Sylvie’s anxieties surrounded this problem: “the life they led, the entirely relative peace they enjoyed, would never be a permanent possession” (60). While the beginning of chapter V describes at great length, times in which the couple is happy, paragraphs following the transition explain how Jerome and Sylvie are returned to reality where there are real perceived dangers and uncertainties regarding their financial well-being. Perec’s lengthy description of the fleeting nature of Jerome and Sylvie’s moments of happiness creates a sense of anxiety about them to the reader. The couple’s constant, almost frantic search for these fleeting moments of wealth and happiness offers a strong critique of the modern money-driven societies of the west which places too much emphasis on material