W, or the Memory of Childhood

The book sets two texts against each other in alternating chapters. One is a fable about W, an island whose whole society is organised around athletic competition, its rules growing colder until they describe something close to a camp. The other gathers fragments of Perec's own childhood: descriptions of a few photographs, uncertain recollections, and corrections of things he has written before. The two strands never openly meet.

Perec was a Jewish boy in occupied France whose father died as a soldier and whose mother was deported and killed. The childhood itself stays beyond direct recall, so he approaches it obliquely, through fiction and through the gaps in what he can remember. The autobiographical passages keep breaking off, qualifying themselves, admitting how little is certain.

For the therapist, it holds the shape of traumatic absence: the way an unbearable history registers as a hole in memory and returns in displaced form. The 1975 French text was translated by David Bellos in 1988.