W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) (Verba Mundi (Paperback))
Georges Perec
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 1567921582
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Nazi occupation of France.
Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's 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...[with] 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, rape common, stealing encouraged 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 this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?
This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?
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remember. There were also Italian soldiers, the Alpine light infantry, in uniforms, I think, of garish green. They weren't much in evidence. They were said to be stupid and harmless. EIGHTEEN It is clear that the overall organization of sporting life on W (the villages, the way teams are made up, selection methods, to mention only the basic elements) has as its sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory. In this respect it can indeed be said that
Chief Trainer - no doubt because the first one to hold the post was a German; those with quadruple names are entitled to a new tracksuit, etc. TWENTY-ONE Once, the Germans came to the school. It was one morning. From very far away we saw two of them — officers — crossing the yard with one of the headmistresses. We went to lessons as usual and didn't see them again. At lunchtime the rumour spread that they had only looked at the school register and then, before leaving, requisitioned the
possess. There is in fact a letter called "Gimmel" which I like to think could be the initial of my first name; it looks absolutely nothing like the sign I have drawn which could just about masquerade as a "mem" or "M". My aunt Esther told me recently that in 1939 — I was three then — my aunt Fanny, my mother's younger sister, used to take me from Belleville to see her. At that time Esther was living in Rue des Eaux, very near Avenue de Versailles. We used to go to play on the banks of the Seine,
that his son Raoul falls in Algeria, d'Artagnan swept off by a cannon-ball at the siege of Maestricht, just after being appointed marechal. I was transported most, and in the literal sense as well, by the death of d'Artagnan, since Henri told it and, with my assistance, acted out its main episodes whilst pushing me around in a little handcart on our long tramps around and about Villard from one farmyard to another to obtain supplies of eggs, milk and butter (I remember the wooden moulds that
translation it wasn't noticeable, but in the original Russian, how did you write it, and what effect did it have on the reader, when you had, for instance, "Rue Cujas", or "Rue Soufflot"?). Henri held out the book to Francois Billoux, who gave it back with his autograph. I, for my part, probably having more luck than I'd had with the bishop, succeeded in getting my hand shaken. ★ I often went to the square to fetch the newspaper (the newsagent-cum-tobacconist-cum-souvenirs-and-postcards
