W or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi (Paperback))

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Summary: THE STORY OF ONE MAN'S JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY!
Review: The story of one man's journey of self-discovery! Georges Perec's W, or The Memory of Childhood is a semi-autobiographical work that forces readers to suspend disbelief and accept that the juxtaposed narratives are a reflection of the author's total human experience. Perec divides his work into two parts with two alternating narratives. The first narrative introduces a narrator the audience believes will travel to the land of W to find Gaspard Winckler, a boy whose identity he assumed to reach Switzerland. The second narrative is an autobiography of Perec's childhood experiences. Perec moves from very basic information, like birthdays and relative names, to more detailed stories with vivid descriptions. In part two, Perec abandons the microcosmic story of the individual searching for another individual established in part one, and turns his focus on the macrocosmic story of the society and culture of W, a world defined by the organized chaos of competitive sport. The society is segregated, has rules with no real meaning, and power is taken to a demonic extreme.

This reviewer initially believed that the W narrative in part one makes readers want to find Gaspard Winckler. The perceived abandonment of the Gaspard Winckler plot and the flip flop between the two possibly unrelated narratives can create questions about the validity of Perec's writing. The author departed from the initial storyline and takes readers to a place that they had not expected to go. Discussing the work with a fellow reader allowed me to look at the total experience of the work in a different light. The book is cumbersome when the reader looks at the two stories as events occurring in two different places. The work should be analyzed as a window into the mind of Perec. The distinctly individual way in which Perec has processed and recorded his memories in his mind allows him to create, extrapolate, reconstruct, destroy, and deny images from his life experiences.

W serves as a sociological metaphor for the past, the present, and a possible reality of the future. Like Miner's `Body Ritual of the Nacirema' article, Perec is creating a metaphor for the reality he has seen, is seeing, and could possibly see. W for Perec's past is how he has come to understand the Nazi occupation in France. W for Perec's present, when he published the work, represented concentration camps in Chile under Pinochet. For the future of the world, W is an apocalyptic vision of a world in which the status quo is not questioned and followed blindly. The W narrative ends in a Rod Serling-esque fashion in which an omniscient perspective reveals that W's inhabitants are slaves to society because they do not challenge the system they live in. The society of W could possibly free itself from its situation if they decide to end the cycle of violence, apathy, humiliation, and sorrow.

Perec's W or The Memory of Childhood chronicles the author's journey to learn more about who he is as a unique individual. He is trying to reconcile his past, present, and future. The journey to understand himself as an individual leads Perec to explore the environment and society he has been subjected to (C. Wright Mill's idea of the sociological imagination). Perec is making a powerful statement about the control humans possess in their lives. Humans are influenced by larger forces within society, and blind obedience to an unseen power could be cancerous. The W narrative and the autobiography reconcile Perec's understanding of his experiences. Perec's W or The Memory of Childhood must be framed as a complete entity that is independent of space and time to appreciate the personal journey through a man's mind.


Rating:
Summary: Perec's "W" a Winner
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Still Amazing, After All These Years...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing- and yet compelling
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Give it a second.
Review: You know those dreams that are especially absurd, but quite realistic? So realistic that reality and fiction have a strange way of mixing the next morning? You awake thinking that your boyfriend is angry at you for cheating on him. With Val Kilmer. Or that you won the Apprentice and are now working for Donald Trump, not at your pathetic job shelving books in the library. And for that brief second reality is clouded and hazy. You have to spend a minute or two telling yourself that you don't even know Val Kilmer. Such is Georges Perec's W, or the Memory of Childhood. It is a confounding blend of reality and fiction. In the beginning it is easy to make a clear distinction, but by the time you reach the end you are not sure where one ends and the other begins. It takes a second to sort it all out

Be forewarned. This is not a book for the Danielle Steele fan.

The story is a twisting dual narrative. One narrative is a memoir of Perec's own childhood during the Holocaust. The other a created story about an island obsessed with sport. Both stories seemingly have nothing to do with the other, but by the end of the book you understand that one was written for the other, the effect much like transposing two photographs on top of each other.

Perec's childhood is with recounted (not in italics) with factual lists-he had a mother, a father, a potty, a cot-and a confession that he has little memory of his childhood. He tells the reader how he remembers his childhood-recalling to the reader the way he recalls it, not how it may have actually happened. (He adds addendums now that he is older to help aid the confused reader.) He retells his childhood devoid of emotion-his mother is sent to the death camps, his father killed in combat, he is sent to different border schools. It is stark in black and white print, told with a voice of indifference. It is this lack of emotionalism that sets the tone for the other story-the story of W (in italics).

Woven just as elusively in his memory of childhood is the story of W. W is a tiny island that at first glance seems to be a land of joy and triumph-a land where the Olympic ideal is revered and honored. It is in the tale, in this island of W that we learn of unspeakable horrors, where champions are elevated like gods and losers killed, beaten, and tortured. A land where Law is chaos and deceit is rewarded. A place where there is no value for human life, just the result it is capable of producing. It is this grotesque story that is charged with emotion and we recoil in repulsion. It is in this story that Perec connects with his own memory of childhood and shares with us how he feels. Perec tells us, "How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare he will suddenly awake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life . . . wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that turns out to be true."(Perec 139-140).

Perec's unusual method allows us to experience the history of the Holocaust in two ways: one a factual representation of the author's own life and the other an emotional horror through the story of W. It is in W we see the full extent of what human nature is capable. Because of this W, or the memory of childhood will haunt and challenge you. It is branded in your memory, as you try to understand it. It takes a second to sort it all out.