Rereading Georges Perec's Life: A User Manual #1

In the Eleanor Marx-Aveling translation of Madame Bovary (available on Guternberg), Charles Bovary's ridiculous hat (of the first chapter) is described as the following:

"It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone."

In Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, in the first chapter titled On the Staircase, a woman of about forty is climbing the stairs. Her hat is described as the following:

"...on her head a kind of felt hat shaped like a sugar-loaf, something like what one imagines a goblin's hat to be, divided into red and grey squares."

I believe Perec was making a tiny nod to Flaubert. Both hats are ridiculous, and difficult to imagine being used in the circumstances that they are. Perec's version is a toned down version, probably an industrially-made version, as his time of writing demands.

Bovary's hat has amused readers for years now. The image above is Vladimir Nabokov's sketch.