W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) [Paperback]

Georges Perec (Author)

Book Description

Series: Verba Mundi | Publication Date: July 16, 2010

From the author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Nazi occupation of France.

Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry.

As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live...[with] no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, rape common, stealing encouraged and violence a fact of life.

Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those "shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores"? How did this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?

This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Exploring a single letter was one among many devices used by Perec ( Life: A User's Manual ), known for his verbal feats. "W" (pronounced in French double-ve ) suggests the double sorrow (the poetic Weh in German) arising from the parallel and interlaced narratives of this quasi-autobiographical novel. Born in Paris of Jewish emigre parents who were killed when he was a child, Perec actually had "no childhood memories," and so invented a personal past based on photographs and the testimony of relatives. The novel alternates a straightforward account of childhood with an imagined journey to a fiendish utopia, i.e., Nazi Germany, whose criminal ideal of Olympic Sport controls every act. Boys train as athletes, while girls become handmaids and, in the big playoff, the champions' rape victims. The regime's mirror-image is found in the Nazi's organized death camps. Common threads link the novel's two narratives. Perec's schooldays evoke the athletes' horrifying education. "W" is the name of the Olympic police state; "W" recurs in the herringbone pattern of Perec's skis, and when repeated and re-aligned forms a Star of David. The writer's search for identity within a historic nightmare provides a moving and important memoir.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The W here is "double ve (vie)," a pun on "double life," and Perec (1936-82) offers two narratives in this 1975 novel: Recollections of an early childhood (like his own) as a Jew during the German occupation of France alternate with the description of a Fascist, sports-crazed regime on an island in Tierra del Fuego. The second narrative is presumably the creation of the first narrator, a pacifist carrying a Swiss passport originally issued to an autistic adolescent possibly abandoned in Tierra del Fuego. The "real" story is conscientiously tentative in its reconstruction; the "imaginary" story is elaborately and unequivocally detailed. The unmistakably British translation in no way detracts from its impact. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine (July 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567921582
• ISBN-13: 978-1567921588
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #574,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still Amazing, After All These Years..., July 22, 2003

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Volkswagen Blues "cead1" - See all my reviews

This review is from: W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

It's about time this book was reissued in English, in a fine translation by Perec's standard-bearer in the Anglophone world. Perec's half-fictive and half-autobiographical masterpiece is an original and devastating approach to one of the most difficult historical moments of the recent past, the Holocaust. "W or the Memory of Childhood" embodies all of the violence of this historical tragedy and of memories of such tragedy.

There are two narrative threads running through this book, touching each other occasionally in a manner that illuminates both in strange and arresting ways. Half of the chapters are "W," the fictional account of a man, Gaspard Winckler, who has survived a war by adopting the identity of a parapalegic (the real Gaspard Winckler) who later dies in a shipwreck off the Tierra del Fuego. Prodded by the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, the living Gaspard embarks on a journey to recover his memory of the real Gaspard, to discover who he was and how he died. This journey becomes, in the second half of "W," a description in coldly anthropological terms of a seemingly totalitarian island-state, in which citizens are forced to compete in brutal and naked athletic games for things like food and the right to procreate--the basics of human life.

The other half of the chapters are Perec's own autobiographical contributions, beginning, despite the promising title of the book, with the admission, "I have no memory of childhood." Perec's voice sifts through his rubbled past--his father's death in the French Army, his mother's transportation to Auschwitz, his being concealed in a Catholic school and raised by his relatives--and attempts to separate what he remembers from what he has been taught to remember through photos, language, etc. His reflections are marked with a humor that is endearing in light of his horrifying experiences, and with a subtlety that is astounding in light of the atrocities to which the text must bear remote witness.

The two narratives, "W" and "The Memory of Childhood," weave around each other like ivy, finally becoming, in a stunning and climactic final chapter, part and parcel of one story. Perec's ultimate fusion of his willful fictions and his awe-full remembrances is powerful and well-presaged; the entire universe of the book builds beautifully and disturbingly toward this final moment, as the fictions become more like fact and the autobiography occupies itself increasingly with fictions.

Bellos' translation is superb, even if one does lose some of the very productive puns of the original (the moment early on, for example, when "l'Histoire avec sa grande hache" should make us think simultaneously of History with a capital H and History with its big axe; Bellos sticks with the capital H rendering of the phrase). (From what I can tell, he has not modified his original translation of the book substantially, if at all.)

"W or the Memory of Childhood" is a sobering, touching, daunting and disturbing reminder of some of the worst our century has had to offer. If you are interested in a writer who is unashamed of standing heroically baffled and gaping in the face of immeasurable atrocity, buy and read this book.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing- and yet compelling, July 24, 2003

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Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

Some memories are so terrible that revisiting them is more than a person can stand. And yet there are stories that need to be told. Goerges Perec, who lost both his childhood and his parents to the Nazis in World War II deals with this problem by telling two stories, one real, and one metaphorical.

The real story of his youth is told almost dispassionately, as if he cannot bear to bring up the emotions of that time- or perhaps it is an accurate telling of a childhood in which emotion was repressed as a way of surviving. The metaphorical tale of the nation of "W" is also told from a distant, and somehwhat dispassionate perspective; it is a cruel land, but the narrator speaks of it as a historian or an anthropolist might.

It is only when the two are read together (the chapters alternate) that the full effect is appreciated by the reader. The cruelties of "W" are in fact alternate tellings of the realities left out of the true narration. Through this, the true horror of Perec's childhood emerges.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perec's "W" a Winner, September 15, 2004

By 

Jeffrey Shall "Jeff Shall" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

Georges Perec's "W, or The Memory of Childhood" is both an autobiographical and fictional look at the world Perec grew up in around the time of World War to and the Nazi occupation of Europe. The work introduces two alternating stories; the first, an observation of an island, W, off Tierra del Fuego, and the second, an autobiographical piece, rely heavily on one another to accurately present an allegorical look at a place easily compared to Nazi Germany.

"W, or The Memory of Childhood" begins in a captivating narrative of Gaspard Winckler, a man who deserted the war and is discovered by one investigating the disappearance of a paraplegic child who bears the same name. Because Gaspard took the child's name in taking a new identity to avoid capture after deserting, he is commissioned to find the child whose body is discovered missing from the wreckage of his mother's yacht after an accident claimed everyone on board's life. This task leads to the island of W, scrupulously depicted as a place where athletic domination reigns supreme and physical capabilities are all that determine a person's worth. When coupled with the autobiographical section of the life of Perec, one gains a clear understanding of his intentions in taking us to W. The reader becomes aware of the horrible circumstances under which the people of W must live. The simultaneous offering of the two stories allows the reader to sympathize wholly with Perec's plight during childhood, as we are able to grasp on multiple levels the tribulations he experienced growing up as a Jew under the Nazis.

For one to obtain a complete recognition of the effect the Nazi regime had during World War II, one must read the allegory and autobiography in alternating fashions as presented. In this manner, we can accurately see, especially in "Part Two" of the narrative, Perec's feelings and interpretations of the Nazi regime and how his life was affected by the fear inflicted by them. For example, Perec was baptized to save himself from being branded in similar fashion to the way novices were branded on the island of W, which, if the representative symbol of the island alone was observed more closely, one could see that it can be rearranged to form either a Star of David or a swastika (such rearrangements of symbols were observed intimately in Perec's autobiographical section). Intriguingly, Perec struggles to separate actual memories from those he has either invented of have been invented for him. He is aware that there are memories he actually recalls himself, such as his mother being sent to a concentration camp and his father dying in war, and those he's unsure if he invented. The concept of real and imagined memories adds complexity to the autobiography and allows one to sympathize further with Perec as he is unable to perform basic memory recollection due to the traumas faced during childhood.

One is unable to deny that "W, or The Memory of Childhood" portrays a powerful message to the reader concerning the fallout of Nazi occupation in Europe. Unlike many stories of the Holocaust, Perec's work focuses on his individual struggle through the time of the Nazi regime allowing a vivid and more personal look into the effect this period had on those who experienced it. Furthermore, the narrative section allowed for one to witness, in comparative fashion, the type of society that the Nazi regime exemplified in their conquest of Europe. Both the intensely emotional aspect of the autobiography and remarkably captivating nature of the narrative easily entrance the reader in Perec's work. "W, or The Memory of Childhood" is a magnificent piece of literature for those possessing even the slightest interest in WWII history.