‘He walked along this famous road [King’s road, London], looking in the windows of the expensive shops selling things which he could not imagine anyone wanting or needing or using: lamps which did not look as if they would emit any light, shoes no woman could stand in, coats which would not keep anyone warm, chairs which had no obvious way to sit on them. People wanted these things, they must do, or the shops wouldn’t be selling them – and yet Patrick was so far from wanting them for himself that he felt that it wasn’t the things for sale which were useless, but he himself. Either the things or the person looking at them were in the wrong place, but the things so clearly belonged here that it must be the person who was lost and redundant.’ (John Lanchester, Capital, Faber and Faber, 2013, pp.233/4)
When I was a student I did a course on Pier Paolo Pasolini and his political writings (Scritti corsari). I was intrigued by his ideas, but I don’t think I understood much. One particular sentence kept ringing in my head though. “Mentre é chiaro che in beni superflui rendono superfluo la vita.” (“Whereas it is obvious that the superfluous products make life superfluous.” My translation). I couldn’t quite grasp what Pasolini meant nor understood why it should be so obvious. John Lanchester nailed it for me decades later in the description of a character in his novel Capital. Here he describes Patrick Kamo, the father of the young Senegalese footballer Freddy.
‘He walked along this famous road [King’s road, London], looking in the windows of the expensive shops selling things which he could not imagine anyone wanting or needing or using: lamps which did not look as if they would emit any light, shoes no woman could stand in, coats which would not keep anyone warm, chairs which had no obvious way to sit on them. People wanted these things, they must do, or the shops wouldn’t be selling them – and yet Patrick was so far from wanting them for himself that he felt that it wasn’t the things for sale which were useless, but he himself. Either the things or the person looking at them were in the wrong place, but the things so clearly belonged here that it must be the person who was lost and redundant.’ (John Lanchester, Capital, Faber and Faber, 2013, pp.233/4)
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