Not Perec's strongest in my opinion. I enjoy his style enough that I finished it, but the allegory was a little too heavy handed for me. Usually I find Perec light hearted and playful, which was not completely absent in W, but I felt like I was being asked to be a little too serious, too concerned. Ah well, I think I'll move on to his Exeter Text next. ( )

Not Perec's strongest in my opinion. I enjoy his style enough that I finished it, but the allegory was a little too heavy handed for me. Usually I find Perec light hearted and playful, which was not completely absent in W, but I felt like I was being asked to be a little too serious, too concerned. Ah well, I think I'll move on to his Exeter Text next. ( )

> PEREC. GEORGES. W ou le souvenir d'enfance. Paris: Denoël, 1975. Pp. 220.
Se reporter au compte rendu de Sonja G. STARY
In: The French Review, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Apr., 1976), pp. 829-830… ; (en ligne),
URL : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W1yxxfieDjuJsfIupAFvZhuv8oqA8UOs/view?usp=shari...

Perec explores his memories of childhood and his reaction to the loss of his parents, both Jewish immigrants from Poland, during World War II. His father died in 1940 from wounds he received fighting in the French army; his mother was deported by the Nazis in early 1944 and is presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Perec was evacuated from Paris to the Dauphiné by the Red Cross in 1942, where he attended a Catholic boarding school and later went to live with relatives.

The book has two alternating and apparently independent narratives. The even-numbered chapters form a fairly conventional memoir narrative, in which Perec examines memories, photographs, and texts he has written about himself earlier and tries to resolve them with what he can learn from family members and others who were around at the time. In many cases he finds that his memories don't square with the facts: he has appropriated to himself interesting or significant events that actually happened to other people, or he has shifted things around in time.

Meanwhile, the odd-numbered chapters, printed in italics, tell the (imaginary) story of a deserter from a French colonial war, now living in Germany under the false name Gaspard Winckler, who is asked to go to the island of W in Tierra del Fuego in search of the real Gaspard Winckler, missing after a shipwreck. As the narrator tells us more and more about W, we start to realise what a strange and disturbing place it is, in which the whole of life is centred around meaningless sporting competitions conducted under an arbitrary, changeable and undisclosed code of rules. Eventually we work out that it is a coded, indirect way into exploring the distorted moral universe of the Nazi concentration camps. Perec doesn't trust himself, or doesn't feel entitled, to write directly about what his mother and other victims must have experienced, and he works his way in by this unexpected and very effective side-entrance. Perec obviously meant us to come to a clear realisation of how the two halves of the book fit together only in the last chapters, but my copy had helpfully been annotated all the way through by an earlier reader. It didn't really spoil it. ( )

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/recent-reads-w-of-the-me... ( )