''A Man Asleep'' (french: Un homme qui dort) is a 1967 novel by the French writer

Georges Perec Georges Perec (; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holoc ...

. It uses a

second-person narrative Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...

, and follows a 25-year-old student, who one day decides to be indifferent about the world. ''A Man Asleep'' was adapted into a 1974 film, '' The Man Who Sleeps''.

Publication

The novel was published in France through

Éditions Denoël Éditions Denoël is a French culture, French publishing house founded in 1930. Acquired by Éditions Gallimard in 1951, it publishes collections spanning fiction, non-fiction and comic books. It published some of the most important French authors ...

in 1967. An English translation by Andrew Leak was published in 1990 through

David R. Godine, Publisher Godine is a New England based independent book publisher, known for its beautifully published and carefully selected books, primarily nonfiction, literary fiction, and poetry. History The company was founded in 1970 by David R. Godine who acted a ...

, in a shared volume with Perec's first novel, '' Things: A Story of the Sixties''.

Reception

Upon the American release,

Richard Eder Richard Gray Eder (August 16, 1932 – November 21, 2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic. Life and career For 20 years, he was variously a foreign correspondent, a film reviewer and the drama critic for ''The New York Times''. ...

of the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' compared the two novels of the volume—''Things'' and ''A Man Asleep''—and wrote that ''Things'' was "the more engaging of the two, though less focused and ultimately, perhaps, less memorable." He wrote that in ''A Man Asleep'', "Perec shows a beauty on the far side of the void; a humanity on the far side of refusal."

References

1967 French novels Novels by Georges Perec Éditions Denoël books French novels adapted into films Second-person narrative novels {{1960s-novel-stub

Publication

Reception

See also

References