Novel
W, or the Memory of Childhood
W ou le souvenir d'enfance
Georges Perec · 1975
Synopsis
Two narratives alternate. In one, Gaspard Winckler, a French deserter living in Germany under an assumed identity, learns from a mysterious interlocutor that this name belonged to a deaf-mute child lost in a shipwreck off Tierra del Fuego, and that he is expected to find him; the narrative then turns to W, an island entirely devoted to sporting competition. In the other, a narrator claims to have no childhood memories, then gathers, from photographs and testimonies, the uncertain images of his war years, which he revisits and corrects.
Context
The book appeared with Denoël in 1975, in the collection Les Lettres nouvelles, after a period of composition that the Encyclopædia Universalis dates from 1970 to 1974. Its fictional part had first appeared as a serial in La Quinzaine littéraire, including an eighth chapter in February 1970. It alternates, chapter after chapter, the account of a French childhood under the Occupation and the fiction of an imaginary island devoted to sport, which the author had invented in his youth according to one study.
Who it is for
Two narratives in alternation, which must be read together: it is their juxtaposition, more than either of them, that makes the book.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English by David Bellos, it appeared in London from Harvill in 1988 under the title W, or the Memory of Childhood.
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