W or the Memory of Childhood

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Overview

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."

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Overview

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, stealing encouraged, rape common, 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 all of this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some in-different, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?

Editorial Reviews

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. (Nov.)
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

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781567921588
  • Publisher: Godine, David R. Publishers, Inc.
  • Publication date: 7/28/2010
  • Pages: 176
  • Sales rank: 575,242
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.50 (d)

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