W, or the Memory of Childhood — Georges Perec

From the author of Life A User's Manual 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.


Perec 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.” Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.