With two narratives being told in alternating chapters, I felt a bit lost at times while reading Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood. I personally found that the switches between the fictional story of W and Perec’s memoir sections to be a bit disruptive and made it difficult to maintaining the flow of reading.

There is W, the fictitious story that starts off with a mystery about of Gaspard Winckler. Although there were some parallels with both the narrator of W and Perec being adopted after the death of their parents, I wasn’t able to catch up on too many connections between the two stories.

However, in the second part of the story, with the introduction of the island W, there were some clear references to Nazi concentration camps. The island seems a bit odd at first with it being described as “a land where Sport is king, a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort” (67).

As the book furthers, the island becomes more and more disturbing. From the age of 14, boys are put into rigorous training programs at four villages where they train for the games. Additionally, the stakes of those games are also fairly high as losers can either be punished with humiliating acts such as being forced to run nude or be sentenced to death. The latter option is brutal as the athlete would be stoned to death by the crowd and then have his corpse on “displayed for three days in the village, suspended on the butcher’s hooks….before being thrown to the dogs” (111).

Moreover, although women on the island of W don’t have to compete in the games, their fates are filled with horrors too. Instead of heading to the villages, they are sent to the Women’s Quarters where their days are filled with doing tasks such as making the tracksuits, and domestic chores. The only time that they are permitted to leave the Quarters is during the Atlantiads; a disturbing monthly even where women have to run nude around a track and the athletes are sent out to chase them and when they catch up, it often results in their rape. All in all, I found the story of W quite disturbing, although I think that could have been the intention of the author as he grapples with the horrors Nazi camps.

With that said, here are some questions for everyone:

Why do you think the title is W, or the Memory of Childhood instead of W, and the Memory of Childhood? Is this supposed to reference the blurred lines between the non-fiction and fiction parts of the story? Also, do you think that the stories would make sense if they were published as two different texts?