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Title: W or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec, David Bellos ISBN: 1-56792-158-2 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Disturbing- and yet compelling
Comment: Some memories are so terrible that revisiting them is more than a person can stand. And yet there are stories that need to be told. Goerges Perec, who lost both his childhood and his parents to the Nazis in World War II deals with this problem by telling two stories, one real, and one metaphorical.
The real story of his youth is told almost dispassionately, as if he cannot bear to bring up the emotions of that time- or perhaps it is an accurate telling of a childhood in which emotion was repressed as a way of surviving. The metaphorical tale of the nation of "W" is also told from a distant, and somehwhat dispassionate perspective; it is a cruel land, but the narrator speaks of it as a historian or an anthropolist might.
It is only when the two are read together (the chapters alternate) that the full effect is appreciated by the reader. The cruelties of "W" are in fact alternate tellings of the realities left out of the true narration. Through this, the true horror of Perec's childhood emerges.
Rating: 5
Summary: Still Amazing, After All These Years...
Comment: It's about time this book was reissued in English, in a fine translation by Perec's standard-bearer in the Anglophone world. Perec's half-fictive and half-autobiographical masterpiece is an original and devastating approach to one of the most difficult historical moments of the recent past, the Holocaust. "W or the Memory of Childhood" embodies all of the violence of this historical tragedy and of memories of such tragedy.
There are two narrative threads running through this book, touching each other occasionally in a manner that illuminates both in strange and arresting ways. Half of the chapters are "W," the fictional account of a man, Gaspard Winckler, who has survived a war by adopting the identity of a parapalegic (the real Gaspard Winckler) who later dies in a shipwreck off the Tierra del Fuego. Prodded by the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, the living Gaspard embarks on a journey to recover his memory of the real Gaspard, to discover who he was and how he died. This journey becomes, in the second half of "W," a description in coldly anthropological terms of a seemingly totalitarian island-state, in which citizens are forced to compete in brutal and naked athletic games for things like food and the right to procreate--the basics of human life.
The other half of the chapters are Perec's own autobiographical contributions, beginning, despite the promising title of the book, with the admission, "I have no memory of childhood." Perec's voice sifts through his rubbled past--his father's death in the French Army, his mother's transportation to Auschwitz, his being concealed in a Catholic school and raised by his relatives--and attempts to separate what he remembers from what he has been taught to remember through photos, language, etc. His reflections are marked with a humor that is endearing in light of his horrifying experiences, and with a subtlety that is astounding in light of the atrocities to which the text must bear remote witness.
The two narratives, "W" and "The Memory of Childhood," weave around each other like ivy, finally becoming, in a stunning and climactic final chapter, part and parcel of one story. Perec's ultimate fusion of his willful fictions and his awe-full remembrances is powerful and well-presaged; the entire universe of the book builds beautifully and disturbingly toward this final moment, as the fictions become more like fact and the autobiography occupies itself increasingly with fictions.
Bellos' translation is superb, even if one does lose some of the very productive puns of the original (the moment early on, for example, when "l'Histoire avec sa grande hache" should make us think simultaneously of History with a capital H and History with its big axe; Bellos sticks with the capital H rendering of the phrase). (From what I can tell, he has not modified his original translation of the book substantially, if at all.)
"W or the Memory of Childhood" is a sobering, touching, daunting and disturbing reminder of some of the worst our century has had to offer. If you are interested in a writer who is unashamed of standing heroically baffled and gaping in the face of immeasurable atrocity, buy and read this book.
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Title: Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, David Bellos ISBN: 0879237511 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Things/a Man Asleep by Georges Perec, David Bellos, Andrew Leak ISBN: 1567921574 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, Barbara Wright ISBN: 0811207897 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: February, 1981 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: 53 Days by Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Jacques Roubaud, David Bellos ISBN: 1567920888 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: 01 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Twentieth Century Classics) by Georges Perec, John (Editor & Translator) Sturrock ISBN: 0140189866 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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