W or The Memory of Childhood
Georges Perec author David Bellos translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:3rd Mar '11
£8.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
A disturbing, ground-breaking book about Perec's wartime childhood, and about where truth and fiction overlap
Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport.
Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself.
Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.
Perec was a haunted writer, haunted by his Jewish ancestry, by the Holocaust that coincided with his own orphaned childhood, by the death of his father in 1940 and his mother's disappearance in Auschwitz. Writing, for him, was an act of exorcism * Sunday Times *
A strange and complicated book, a work of tremendous, silenced emotion * Observer *
His brilliant and profound memoir-fantasy deserves to be recognised for what it is: a masterpiece * Guardian *
The childhood story of 'W' carries Perec's confused conception of the concentration camps...bewilderingly sad * Independent *
Perec was a polymathic genius, and his early death in 1982 (he was only 45) robbed France of its most dazzling experimental writer, one who tried everything and failed at nothing...He has, deservedly, become a cult in France, particularly with young Parisians, who instinctively (and rightly) identify him as the super-zapper, the biographer of their fragmented consumer culture, of which he was himself the creation. * Glasgow Herald *
ISBN: 9780099552352
Dimensions: 194mm x 136mm x 18mm
Weight: 120g
176 pages