W, Or, The Memory of ChildhoodW, Or, The Memory of Childhood
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 ... Ýwith¨ 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?
From the author of Life A User’s Manual comes an equally mind-bending novel: an interpretive vision of the Holocaust and a dystopian world.
W or The Memory of Childhood is a narrative that reflects a great writer’s effort to come to terms with his childhood during the Nazi occupation of France.
Perec tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing his 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...no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out.”
Perec’s memory of the Holocaust and vision about its meaning has resulted in an astonishing achievement that stands with the best of his work.
Relates the horrific twin tales of a fragile boyhood in occupied France and of the mysterious island of W, a remote place near Chile where athletes undergo horrible competitions.
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- Boston : D.R. Godine, 1988.
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