W, or the Memory of Childhood has been one of my favourite books this term because of the unique storytelling style and the way it explores a lingering presence of trauma and history in the more autobiographical narrative. I was initially a bit skeptical of how two unrelated stories could provide so much coherence and support each other to the point where you could intertwine them and call it a single book. I ultimately felt that the history of W was an interesting way to describe mechanisms of social inequality and a slightly terrifying look into societies centred around hierarchies (under the more innocent pretense of sports).

For the first 100 pages or so, I felt that W had a culture in which victors and the “top” were glorified; it seemed like Winckler’s narrative deliberately ignored the non-athletes and losers of the games, by mentioning how only athletes and athletic-adjacent people lived in the villages. I wondered what happened to the “others” pretty quickly after because they weren’t discussed as prominently. By shifting the narrative to the victors and the athletes, it seems that a society based on glorifying victory and treating the “non-victors,” or the people not at the top, poorly, can have an outward appearance of prosperity and happiness, but there are some underlying issues to be dealt with.

The semi-autobiography part felt like a much more standard recount of experiences, somewhat similar to what I read in Black Shack Alley, but there was a kind of erasure of experiences during the narrator’s formative years. I initially assumed that was because they had trouble coming to terms with the horrors and realities of the war, and that forgetting everything (and conveniently not having photographs) represented a way to cope with trauma. There seems to be a deliberate focus on memories unrelated to war, with Perec only making passing references to it (like how the trauma of Nada is never explicitly put in context of the civil war), and I thought that putting the issues with Nazi Germany into a story about a fictional sporting island was a way to process those emotions.

The allegory of W ultimately helped me understand how the narrator must have seen the intrusion of “unrelated” and seemingly “unimportant” things like sports (or religion in his case) into important things like people’s nutrition and social status. As a whole, I felt like W, or the Memory of Childhood was an interesting way to discuss memories of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism without feeling like it disrespected people’s experiences.

As a result, the question I wanted to ask was “How is the narrator’s understanding of the history and trauma surrounding himself reflected and expressed in the story of W?”