Hey everyone! W Or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec was an especially difficult read for me. It was very difficult for me to follow along and comprehend what was occurring in the story. The switching narratives and stories certainly did not help this situation.
The book in a lot of ways reminded me of another book I had read once named The History of Bees by Maja Lunda. They are similar in the sense that there are multiple stories and perspectives but ultimately they are tied together by the end. While The History of Bees puts obvious effort into tying the different fictional stories together, W Or the Memory of Childhood does not seem to do the same on the surface level despite my consistent expectation of it throughout the book. W Or the Memory of Childhood leaves it up to the reader to make the connections between the stories and does not explicitly connect the stories in the book.
W or the Memory of Childhood grapples with some very dark elements especially when they describe what became of the people with the boy on the ship. It then further explores darker elements in its description of the made-up land of W where people are brutally tormented and made into athletes.
The formatting of the books encourages a lot of metaphorical and analytical thinking in order to connect the stories. I personally did not find it effective because I was struggling to piece together the different stories. It was only after watching the lecture video and researching a bit I figured out that the alternating chapters were actually an autobiography. When I first read it I was trying to figure out how completely different alternating chapters about the boy would aid the other story.
The information on how W is supposed to represent two lives or two ‘yous’ was very eye-opening to me. This simple but symbolic detail is actually very mind-boggling to me because it artistically and visually demonstrates how two lives are connected. This in a lot of ways symbolically represents the ties of the author’s life and autobiography to the constructed symbolic athletic place of W. By understanding this piece of information I am inclined to believe that the stories mirror each other in some ways and with active effort you could find meaningful connections.
One question I have is, what happened to the boy who shared the name from part one? Or what are we to make of his disappearance?
katrina juliano
March 8, 2022 — 4:44 am
Thank you for the great read!
As for your question, I also had a similar question myself. After arriving at the island of W, the story seemed to diverge from the original plot of finding this missing Gaspard, and ended up just being a description of W as a location and habitation. In my theory, Gaspard was kind of like a mirror image of the narrator Georges (starting from their similar names), and their mothers also had similar names (Cecile and Caecilia). If we were to go off of Gaspard being Georges in the fictional world, I’d like to think that the disappearance of the original Gaspard was Georges’ way of ‘throwing away’ his old self. Since the body of Gaspard wasn’t ever found, if we were to assume that he somehow ended up washed up on W, he would have been subjected to the same horrors we read about, which would kind of mirror the traumas that Georges went through as a child.