Things, Again: Revisiting Perec’s Things via Latronico’s Perfection
by Arshia Eghbali
There is a saying in literary circles that “there is a Borges short story for everything”. Well, that’s not true. I just made that up, but I think Borges would have done the same. And there is a Borges short story that’s indeed relevant here. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, which is written as a faux review essay, discusses the life’s work of a made-up, eccentric writer called Pierre Menard: an exact rewriting of Cervantes’ DonQuixote, word for word in the original early 17th century Spanish. Borges (or his narrator, if you will) argues that although Menard arrives at the same words as Cervantes, he does so as an early 20th-century Frenchman, and therefore, those identical words produce different meanings.
Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (Le perfezioni), published in Italian in 2022 and to much acclaim in English in 2025, is a rewriting of Georges Perec’s 1965 debut novel Things (Les choses). Evidently, Latronico doesn’t go as far as Menard, but it’s safe to say that if Perec, by his own account, wrote Things with a pile of Madame Express magazines and a copy of Barthes’s Mythologies at his side, then sixty years later, Latronico must have written Perfection with Instagram and Airbnb on his screen and a copy of Things open in front of him. Perec subtitled his novel “A Story of the Sixties”. Latronico doesn’t give us a decade, but the book is unmistakably a story of our times. Perfection is Things v2.0. And this is not grounds for dismissal—quite the opposite: that’s what a writer is meant to do with Perec’s books.
Georges Perec was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle:Workshop of potential literature). Still active today, OuLiPo was founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Its aim is to explore the potentialities of language through writing games and self-imposed rules. The constraints that Oulipians apply to language and literary composition are designed to both oblige creative feats and generate “literature in unlimited quantities, potentially producible until the end of time, in enormous quantities, practically infinite” [1].
Perec didn’t join OuLiPo until a couple of years after the publication of Things, but potentiality was always central to his work, which is crystallized in a peculiar feature of his writing: its imitability. Perec’s various Oulipian exploits, lipograms (the famous novel without the letter ‘e’), anagrams, univocalisms; his mathematical algorithms and constraints; his non-Oulipian stylistic exercises; his schemes of observation and remembrance; his willingness to let readers peek into his workshop and to write about his process of writing; or at times, prompting readers outright to do something—all these render Perec’s works a generative source for further creation. Perec’s writing is imitable and generative by design. And that’s precisely what Latronico has nailed down.
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Things tells the story of Jérôme and Sylvie, a young couple, and their transition from being students to common adult life; from dropping out of the “studies they had never really begun” (30) and a few years of wandering around, to deciding to finally “be done with it, once and for all, like everyone else” (154), and be “well-housed, well-fed, and well-dressed” (156) [2]. The story opens with the description of a domestic interior and its things in the conditional tense, a description of what would be: Jérôme and Sylvie’s dream apartment and, by extension, dream life.
Then, the rest of the story is told, for the most part, in the imperfect past tense (l’imparfait), giving the impression of a continuous, repeated state of life. We see Jérôme and Sylvie in their daily life in Paris as psychosociologues—that is, despite the fancy title, market research interviewers: “Do you like frozen food? How much do you think a lighter like this one costs? What do you expect from your mattress? Could you describe a man who likes pasta? What do you think of your washing machine?” (34) Their job leaves them a good deal of free time, which they spend fantasizing about getting rich and acquiring the things they dream of. Home décor magazines, most of all Madame Express (45-48), and the charming storefronts of Rue Jacob or Rue Visconti fuel their desires. They and their friends live like that, in small apartments, among things and advertisements and dreams for sale. They are not miserable or poor, but they are certainly not rich, and they are also not really happy. They dread a mediocre existence, and they strive for an upper middle-class life of comfort and quick trips to London and New York. But they don’t find themselves on the path to what they desire.
They decide that they cannot “live in a frenzy for very long […] in this world that promised so much and delivered nothing” (119). And so, they make their escape: they move to Sfax, Tunisia. There, Sylvie finds a teaching job, and they get a much bigger apartment with two balconies. But they don’t have enough things to fill up the space which is “too big and too bare for them to be able to live in it” (126). And the storefronts of Sfax and its markets don’t have dreams to offer them. Once again, they find themselves at a dead-end. “Before, at least, they had the frenzy of having [more things]. Often it was wanting that had filled up the place of existence for them. They had felt drawn forward, impatient, consumed with desire” (147-148).
The story comes to an end with an epilogue in the future tense, with what will happen to Jérôme and Sylvie. It is now a matter of fate. They leave Sfax, move back to France and settle down in Bordeaux, where they take over a marketing agency and build a comfortable life in a nice home with some of the things they always wanted. “A happy ending and the saddest ending one could imagine, it is a logical ending… what is more natural than working to earn a living?”, as Perec himself says in an interview in 1965, where he also bluntly points out that those who imagine that he is simply renouncing the consumer society “have really understood nothing of my book” [3].
In Things, the domestic interior, from large pieces of furniture to vinyl records and notepads, is meticulously described and redescribed throughout the book:
A roll-top desk littered with papers and pen-holders would go with a small cane-seated chair. On a console table would be a telephone, a leather diary, a writing pad. Then, on the other side of another door, beyond a low, square revolving bookcase supporting a large, cylindrical vase decorated in blue and filled with yellow roses, set beneath an oblong mirror in a mahogany frame, there would be a narrow table with its two benches upholstered in tartan, which would bring your eye back to the leather curtain (10-11).
These objects are the components of a setting, a design that is carefully laid out to manifest a way of life, a certain aesthetic, an art of living. The objects and the kind of interior space that Jérôme and Sylvie dream of are not simply objects or spaces but signs of social status, and simultaneously, causes and effects of happiness. They dream of having a Chesterfield settee not simply because it is comfortable or beautiful, nor because they want to give out the message that they are rich, but because they believe that a home with a Chesterfield in it is a happy home. If you have the taste to appreciate certain things and you can also readily afford them, that is happiness. “Their means and their desires would match on all levels all the time. They would call this equilibrium happiness” (16), and that is why by being rich and having this ideal good taste, their lives would be an enactment of “an art of living” (17).
There is a tight relationship between consumption and happiness, between things and the good life. But this happiness is bound to remain merely a possibility, which is precisely the intended effect of Perec’s use of the conditional tense. In the capitalist society, dominated by advertisements and images of happiness, countless things are promised but of course almost none of them can be had. It is a simple and plain fact: one can and does live only one life, one trajectory, but there is an infinite number of unlived lives.
That is the magic and indeed the curse of youth. Jérôme and Sylvie are mesmerized by these possible forms of happiness. They drop out of their studies because they begin to see themselves caught in a trap; they feel that they will have to commit to only one (mediocre) life all too soon: “As students, the prospect of a mediocre degree and then a teaching job with a small salary at Nogent-sur-Seine, Château-Thierry or Etampes terrified them so much” (30). They can be anything, why should they embark on a journey that would only lead to one thing? So, they choose uncertainty and temporariness: “They had settled down in the temporary. They worked like others study; they chose their own hours. They wandered around like only students do” (75).
Soon, Jérôme and Sylvie consume and exhaust their freedom in Paris, but they try to perpetuate the temporariness, to maintain this uncertainty, so they move to Sfax. But as we know, their Tunisian adventure also falls short of realizing their vague ambitions. They fail to furnish their vast, unhomely apartment. They put up photos of their friends, fill the bookshelves with their books and records, but what little they have brought with them torturously reminds them of their tiny apartment in Rue de Quatrefages, of their life in Paris. They have no friends. And the city has nothing to offer them. They don’t buy anything. They can’t consume. There is no vibrant cultural (read: commercial) life to amuse them and no objects behind shop windows to set fire to their desire—or so they feel. They don’t belong: they are cut off from their system of signs, their system of objects. The final blow comes to them in the guise of a stunningly beautiful house. It is, ironically, in Tunisia that, one day, they come across their dream house. They get invited to a lavish party at the house of an elderly English couple who live between Tunisia and Florence:
The house was paradise on earth. Set in the midst of a great park sloping gently down to a fine sandy beach, it was an old building in the local idiom, not particularly large, all on one level, which had grown year by year and become the sun of a whole constellation of pavilions of all sizes, of arbours, shrines, bungalows with verandas on all four sides, dotted around the estate and connected to each other by lattice-walled walkways. There was an octagonal room with no openings other than a small door and two narrow slit windows, with its thick walls entirely lined with books, which was as shady and cool as a tomb; there were tiny rooms, whitewashed like monastic cells, with only two Saharan armchairs and a low table to furnish them; other rooms were long, low and narrow, with walls hung with thick mats, and yet others furnished in English country style, with inglenooks and massive fireplaces flanked by a pair of settees facing each other. In the grounds, white marble-paved paths meandered amongst the lemon trees, the orange trees and the almonds, lined with fragments of antique pillars. There were brooks and waterfalls, grottos and ponds covered with large white water-lilies between which you could sometimes see the silvery streak of fish. Peacocks paraded, uncaged, just as they had dreamed. Bowers overgrown with roses led to lush hideaways (145-146).
Jérôme and Sylvie realize that this sort of luxury dwelling, this type of cosmopolitan life, was what motivated them in the first place to move to Tunisia. They fled from Paris so that the mediocrity of mundane middle-class life would not catch up with them, but Sfax was their appointment in Samarra. “That [cosmopolitan life] was certainly the kind of life they had first dreamed of: but they had only become Sfaxians, provincials, exiles” (147).
And so, they finally take their leap of conformity, accept what they tried to delay all along, and ease into the life they were destined for. If they are bound to be “provincials”, they will be so in Bordeaux. They will, at least, be at the margins of the system of signs they were so absorbed by, not completely out of it. They will finally become cadres (the French expression for white-collared workers, executive employees) and work full-time. They will have the Chesterfield settee they always dreamed of. In the final pages of the book, we see them aboard the outward train from Paris reminiscing, in a rather superficial, all too well packaged nostalgia about their years of errant life and imagined freedom. They are still young, “they will not be thirty yet” (156), but they have their “free youth” packed into a commodity now, a touched-up memory, an image of the past that can finally be consumed. They celebrate and mourn the loss of something they never really had: the freedom of youth and endless potential.
This illusory freedom is a mythical image of youth. Perec repeatedly talked about the influence of Roland Barthes and his Mythologies on Things. He sent the manuscript to Barthes around 1963–1964, and Barthes responded very positively, describing it as “a story about the poverty inextricably mixed with the image of wealth” [4]. Like Barthes, Perec was concerned with the mythical images that the consumer society bombards us with. Modern happiness is a process of accumulation. Possessing more things means more happiness. And the key feature of this system is that it is an open-ended one. For it to work perpetually upwards, that happiness must always remain merely a possibility, a potential, always differed.
To be sure, the things Jérôme and Sylvie so vehemently desire are signs of social status and happiness but the real image that needs to be demystified in Things is not the object but the mythical image of youth. What Barthes identified as myth’s power to naturalize and depoliticize—thereby alienating the consumer from the inherently political processes of production behind objects—is transformed here into the alienation of young people from the reality that underpins consumption: work, conformity, and the relinquishing of freedom. Things is a critique of the myth of youthful freedom under consumer capitalism, and of our misplaced belief that freedom exists outside social and economic structures. That is the significance behind the quote from Marx with which Perec ends the novel:
The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true; the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result (158).
Jérôme and Sylvie ultimately realize that in order to consume the sign-objects they desire, they must accept what they had attempted to escape all along. The uncertainty and freedom they believed would save them from a mediocre nine-to-five existence are nothing but a myth. Perec deliberately refrains from endowing his protagonists with the critical faculties necessary to articulate this realization fully; Jérôme and Sylvie never reflect on the myths surrounding the objects they desire. Instead, Perec assigns this task to the reader. If we are to understand and criticize consumer objects as myths, we need to also understand the mythical image of youth; we need to take a leap from utopia to reality. If there is ever a possibility for acting upon this world, it is from within that caged existence, not from a position of imagined freedom. The image of free youth is a myth to be consumed, in the literal sense of being used up. As such, it can only ever be volatile and temporary: celebrated, nostalgically packaged, and ultimately mourned as the loss of something that never truly existed.
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With Perfection, Latronico pulls a Pierre Menard and brings this “story of the Sixties” into the 21st century and turns it into a satire about restless millennials, reusing the plot, the structure, and the style of Things. Anna and Tom, the young couple of Perfection, seem to live a free life. They live abroad, they work remotely as designers, they go clubbing in Berlin, they take drugs, they hang out with friends from all over the world. But they are constantly trapped in a liminal space. They live their life by social media standards, but they strive for authenticity (contrary to Jérôme and Sylvie, their ideal home, here described in the present tense, is not imaginary, it’s their own home, but only as it appears in its most staged form in their Airbnb photos). They know all the right bars and art galleries but can’t speak the local language well and all their friends are other expats. They are freelance, “creative professionals”, but there’s little freedom or creativity in being “hunched over a computer screen in their living room” (110) [5].
As the book approaches its end, it becomes clear that Anna and Tom’s tendency to dwell in the temporary has given its place to dwelling in the past. Their desire to keep all potential futures at hand, to chase that mythical image of youth (which they found mainly on social media), turns into a nostalgia for something they never really had, à la Jérôme and Sylvie.
They will catch themselves reminiscing with unreasonable fondness about those miserable few months in Sicily, about the romantic nights spent trembling under two blankets in Lisbon, about the sea breeze roaring through their car in Noto, with the Mediterranean a mere twenty minutes away—although in reality it had been more like an hour. They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in Berlin and then tried and failed to find again that winter. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city's history and theirs. Intensely disorientated, they will find themselves unable to disentangle one from the other; and this, their sudden inability to access a version of their past unfiltered by nostalgia, will be their understanding of nostalgia.
How long will they be able to go on like this? In theory, forever (110).
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By emulating Things, Latronico engages with, and eventually reinforces, the potentiality of the Perecquian project. In that sense, Things is a novel-recipe that could be updated every few decades, infinitely. The ingredients: the semi-autobiographical plot; the young couple as the protagonists; the change of verb tense to propel the narrative through the ideal, the routine, the event, and fate; the impersonal, objective tone; the repetition of certain phrases and objects throughout the narrative; and the idea of holding up a mirror to a generation.
In Pierre Menard, Borges argues that “the Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer”. One is tempted to make the same argument about Perfection: that it is almost infinitely richer. Simply because it contains in it Things as well. But it’s possible to make a different argument, precisely on the basis of “potential literature”: since Things, Perfection always already existed, potentially. Latronico has only actualized that potential.
That, and perhaps the fact that the problem of youth never gets old.
Notes
[1] “Qu’est-ce que l’Oulipo ?” by Marcel Bénabou & Jacques Roubaud. Accessible at: https://oulipo.net/fr/oulipiens/o
[2] The page numbers refer to the French Pocket edition printed in 2017 (G. Perec. Les Choses. Paris: Julliard, 1965). The translations are my own, except for the passages that are quoted as a separate block. In those cases, the page numbers still refer to the French original, but the translations are by David Bellos as published in G. Perec. Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. London: Vintage Classics, 2011.
[3] «Le bonheur est un processus... on ne peut pas s'arrêter d'être heureux», propos recueillis par Marcel Bénabou et Bruno Marcenac, Les Lettres françaises, n° 1108, 2-8 décembre 1965. Reprinted in: Georges Perec, Entretiens, conférences, textes rares, inédits. (Textes réunis, présentés et annotés par Mireille Ribière avec la participation de Dominique Bertelli), Nantes : Joseph K., 2019, pp. 55, 53. My translation.
[4] Printed in: Roland Barthes, Album: inédits, correspondances et varia. (Édition établie et présentée par Éric Marty). Paris: Seuil, 2015, pp. 316-317. My translation.
[5] The page numbers refer to the English edition: V. Latronico, Perfection (trans. Sophie Hughes). London: Fitzcaraldo Editions, 2025. The same passages in the original Italian are to be found in pp. 128-129 of the edizione Tascabili printed in 2025: V. Latronico, Le perfezioni. Milan: Bompiani, 2022.