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W, or the Memory of Childhood

W, or the Memory of Childhood

by Georges Perec
Translated by David Bellos

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Product Details

Verba Mundi

Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-56792-158-8
Pages: 176
Size: 5.22" x 8.86"
Published: February 2002
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From the author of Life A User’s Manual comes an equally mind-bending 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.

Perec tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing his 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...no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out.”

Perec’s interpretive vision of the Holocaust is an astonishing achievement.

Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

David Bellos
David Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In 2005, he won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation for his translations of the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. He holds the rank of Officier in the Ordre national des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary membership in The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters.