Georges Perec: W, or the Memory of Childhood

This reading was a little easier and fun for me because of the dual narrative. I personally find it easier to stick to books if I am reading two at the same time – one book compensates for the monotonous parts of the other at different stages of the books. In this case, I got two stories (although related) in one! I loved the feeling of suddenly being transported to a different context with every switch between narratives. The style of this book reminded me of another book with a very unique style: White Blight by Athena Farrokhzad, a Swedish author. That book is written like a poem with only a few lines on a page, spaced sparsely, and highlighted in black.

The strongest feeling that Perec’s two narratives elicited for me were of memory and nostalgia. Specifically, memories that are hard to remember with certainty and vividity, and yet, have shaped us. Especially when those memories are of tragic and horrific events, such as the holocaust, as is the case in this book. This is in contrast with Proust’s Combray where we read about very vivid memories (even if they are not always true memories). These two texts deviate starkly in how they express and deal with faded memories: Perec is explicit about the uncertainty of the facts from his childhood while Proust tried to fill in gaps in his memory with fiction (even if motivated by reality).

This was also an interesting read because, unlike some of the previous readings, these narratives are set in a time and context that I am somewhat familiar with. I can understand how the author is unclear on the specifics of World War II – because he and his family were living through it, not observing/studying it decades later in retrospect as we are.

The connection between the two narratives became clearer toward the second half of the book when the events of W started becoming a lot more brutal and hostile to the losers. The parallels between Nazi concentration camps and the Olympics were evident. He describes the law of the land in W to be “organized injustice” and society being based on “fundamental and elementary inequity” (111) – systems that seem very much like what the Nazis were aiming for through their concentration camps and policies.

Perec seems to be trying to make sense of Nazi-time Europe through the fictional island of W, for both himself and the reader. Thinking about W, it feels like a fictional world. The fact that there are such real parallels between this fictional world and the real world helps us acknowledge how unreal and brutal Nazism was – it was too morally abhorrent to be real.

My question for discussion is this: did this book change your perceptions about Nazi Germany? How? Did you find this style of writing to be effective in communicating the true horrors of a time that we cannot personally experience?