Inventive French novel ‘A Man Asleep’ comes out

This book by a writer whose many works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word has been translated into Persian by Naser Nabavi. Farhang-e Nashr-e No has released ‘A Man Asleep’ (French: Un homme qui dort) in 127 pages.

Using a second-person narrative, the novel is about a young man, 25-year-old student who gives up his school examinations, his friends, and his purpose in life. He does as little as possible, wants as little as possible, takes as little interest in life as he can. He is "asleep."

The nameless student in 'The Man Who Sleeps' 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 wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.

'The Man Who Sleeps' was adapted into a 1974 film, 'The Man Who Sleeps' directed by Perec and Bernard Queysanne.

Many of Perec's novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy. His first novel 'Les Choses' (published in English as Things: A Story of the Sixties) (1965) was awarded the Prix Renaudot.

Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel ‘La disparition’ (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter "e".

His most famous novel 'La Vie mode d'emploi' (Life A User's Manual) was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. ‘La Vie mode d'emploi’ is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block.