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W, or the Memory of Childhood
Combining inventive fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world, and at the crux of his own identity.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Georges Perec
139 books1,526 followersGeorges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
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September 2, 2021
Memory and imagination… Is there a borderline in between?
W, or the Memory of Childhood is a duad of parallel narrations: the first is a true story of childhood, ruined by the war and fascism, and the second is a pure fiction of Olympian utopia…
But the recollections of childhood become blurred and distorted by hiatuses in memory, tricks of consciousness and false remembrances while the Olympian utopia is gradually turning into the sadistically misanthropic dystopia so in the end the gloomy conceptions of both narrations converge.
Utopia is a place that doesn’t exist… Childhood is a place that can’t be revisited…
For years I sought out traces of my history, looking up maps and directories and piles of archives. I found nothing, and it sometimes seemed as though I had dreamt, that there had been only an unforgettable nightmare.
W, or the Memory of Childhood is a duad of parallel narrations: the first is a true story of childhood, ruined by the war and fascism, and the second is a pure fiction of Olympian utopia…
A triple theme runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it suggests suspension, support, almost artificial limbs. To be, I need a prop. Sixteen years later, in 1958, when, by chance, military service briefly made a parachutist of me, I suddenly saw, in the very instant of jumping, one way of deciphering the text of this memory: I was plunged into nothingness; all the threads were broken; I fell, on my own, without any support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the controlled descent.
But the recollections of childhood become blurred and distorted by hiatuses in memory, tricks of consciousness and false remembrances while the Olympian utopia is gradually turning into the sadistically misanthropic dystopia so in the end the gloomy conceptions of both narrations converge.
Utopia is a place that doesn’t exist… Childhood is a place that can’t be revisited…
June 14, 2024
As a Jew in Nazi-occupied France, it's little wonder Georges the young boy had a mind that wondered. Losing both parent's early, one at four, the other at six, he barely remembers a thing before his twelfth birthday. This is Perec looking back in his thirties, trying to piece together fragmented memories, the events that took place during his childhood, but the best he can conjure are details of an elaborate imagined world that he created for himself at the time, an uncharted Island off Tierra del Fuego called W. And that of an eight year old deaf-mute called Gaspard Winckler. Perec is also Winckler, but another. Trapped in search of the boy. W was home to a noble culture and different tribes, that valued athletic power and prowess above all else. Life there had a strict users manual, and was one glorious Olympiad. As Perec's thoughts on his actual up-bringing grow stronger, the events on W turn increasingly brutal, two alternating narratives, the real and the fantasy, intersect into one, where for Perec, there is no easy escape, resulting in the shocking truth.
I found this by far to be Perec's most personal and deeply moving book. It's quite a remarkable achievement in the way he deals with his haunted past. In a partly disturbing manner using silenced emetions, this semi-autobiographical work doesn't really say all about W, and doesn't really say all about his rediscovered wartime childhood. Perec's unpretentious fragments, are in a language of persistent self-criticism and attention to detail that leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-war world and his own forgotten identity. Although the word 'Holocaust' doesn't actually get mentioned in it's entirety, and the bigger picture never truly comes into a focus of clarity, it's pretty easy to figure out later on just where the heart of this book lies. Exploring a single letter was one among many devices used by Perec, and again here he plays around with letters as well as numbers in his detailed descriptions of what took place on W, and his use of photographs plays a big part when recollecting childhood. Both stories are frequently alternating, sometimes within only a couple of pages. So, the big question is, did this in any way hamper the reading process?, for me, absolutely not. One minute Perec is talking of his aunt, the next we are on W hearing how male athletes are allowed to chase down and rape women. At about this point, my mind started to think Nazism, and that's precisely the point, even in the comfort of his more lighthearted moments as a boy, the atrocities the Third Reich inflicted are never far away.
This isn't really two stories in one, it's one story but told fictionally and actually. It's deceptive brilliance is paramount, and could even be seen as a strong testimony to the people who lived and died during the darkest days of the war.
August 6, 2014
Sometimes the face of an author or the title of a book conceals a lot more than what it is capable of revealing and the same happened when I picked this book. My first Perec and I expected something completely different from what was eventually encountered. W, or The Memory of Childhood is a revelation of unconventional sorts where the measured doses of harrowing truth are served in a fantastical glass bowl, which is destined or susceptible to break sooner than later.
She died without understanding.And so did many others. Childhood of a writer which was overshadowed by a brutish war is narrowed down by recalling some bleary facts and devising an allegory around the place of an ingenious imagination. The purpose is not to simplify but to assert lives of those who died “without understanding” and left behind the ones who lived to achieve that knotty understanding which is untangled here with the help of an inconsistent memory of our narrator. A memory tainted with pain and the only relief can be sort within the written word. Words which are highly personal yet work at a universal level by walking through the unique structure that Perec has employed in this work. Divided into two parts, one part depicts the story of a life which was lost in the deep ocean of injustice and another unveils an island of utopian standards ready to perish under the barbaric shadows of unworthy rulers. In the end, an astonishing connection emerges which can render a reader speechless at the resulting vision.
How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative.Hopelessness behind these symbolical barbed lines is aggravated if one thinks of WWII, Nazi occupation, Auschwitz or Holocaust but let’s not say anything because they are not mere terms intended for inaudible whispers or perfunctory scribbling but enclose within them the plight of those mothers who weren’t able to rock the cradle of their newborn babies, the dashed hopes of those fathers who weren’t able to feed their kids and dark memories of children who were left with a childhood which was maimed and smeared with blackness only to re-invent and remembered in the later years, an example of which can be witnessed and perhaps feel after reading this wonderfully terrifying novel.
Read
June 14, 2020If you come across this unusual book, you might need some incentives to read it, apart from star ratings (and, be warned, after reading W, you way have unpleasant reactions to ratings in general in the future).
So here are some incentives: try to imagine writing a memoir of your childhood years between the ages of three and nine, set in the period from 1939 to 1945. Imagine that you have only a few photos and that your own fairly vivid memories don't always match the accounts of relatives or the evidence of the photos. Imagine that you can write beautifully and with an amazing insight into the workings of a child's mind. Now you have an idea of the treats in store in the Souvenir d'Enfance or Memoir part of this book.
Next, imagine that the child who experienced such a childhood later created an incredibly detailed and complex fictional world based on the brutal rules of the survival of the fittest in order to explain to himself the inhuman logic behind the notion of concentration camps.
Now you know that W is an oblique and startling commentary on the holocaust. You have read nothing like this ever. The cool, objective, logical tone of the writing in W draws you in. You will feel compelled to keep turning the pages until you reach the end.
So here are some incentives: try to imagine writing a memoir of your childhood years between the ages of three and nine, set in the period from 1939 to 1945. Imagine that you have only a few photos and that your own fairly vivid memories don't always match the accounts of relatives or the evidence of the photos. Imagine that you can write beautifully and with an amazing insight into the workings of a child's mind. Now you have an idea of the treats in store in the Souvenir d'Enfance or Memoir part of this book.
Next, imagine that the child who experienced such a childhood later created an incredibly detailed and complex fictional world based on the brutal rules of the survival of the fittest in order to explain to himself the inhuman logic behind the notion of concentration camps.
Now you know that W is an oblique and startling commentary on the holocaust. You have read nothing like this ever. The cool, objective, logical tone of the writing in W draws you in. You will feel compelled to keep turning the pages until you reach the end.
April 27, 2015
Like Federman’s body of work, here Perec is undertaking the terrible task of writing around the Shoah. For Perec, such a task is unavoidable, if he, as a writer, is to write an autobiography. As he says somewhere near the beginning of this book, he has no childhood memories, his history was written for him by History itself. W, the double-V, dooble-veh, twin Vs side-by-side, as a symbol manipulable into any number of iterations- turn it upside down it becomes the “M” of memory, join the twin Vs at the tip and they become a mathematical symbol of multiplication, the X that marks the spot for one seeking treasure, or that acts, in a text, as the mark of deletion for an expunged word or letter (perhaps an e?), or it is a railroad crossing, a place from which one might see trains depart (to where?)- tilt the X and it becomes a St. Andrew’s cross or the cross of the crucifixion, extend the endpoints of the tilted X just a bit and we find we have made ourselves a swastika… but let us take the double-V’s doubling nature now as the essence of the two strands of this book - the first, Perec’s attempt to seek out by way of Mnemosyne the elusive fragments of his early childhood in France during WWII - the second, a nightmare tale of an island on the other side of the world called W, a society devoted to inhumanly cruel Sport. Of course the real book we find ourselves reading is the place where these strands suggest an overlapping, their “points of suspension”, the “mindless mist where shadows swirl” - the thing too terrible to be named, as in Federman’s typographic “concrete” novels, emerges as inscribed between and around and under or above the story or the letters and sentences that compose it, invisible but sounding. What is written is dead as soon as it is written, the writing is that death and its memorial simultaneously, as well as the assertion that the writer indeed has lived to bear witness. And those who have departed can only be carried by these fragile vessels. Try to trace the rising, dissipating smoke trail back to a single ember amid a conflagration, that is this kind of remembering.
This book will haunt you, as it should; it will bring tears, it should; it will resonate within you like the interstices of a dream or nightmare attempting to be recollected after waking up, the corners or fissures of a dream or nightmare. It will make you grateful for the courage of the author, and sorrowful for our History as it was made to be written.
~~
This book will haunt you, as it should; it will bring tears, it should; it will resonate within you like the interstices of a dream or nightmare attempting to be recollected after waking up, the corners or fissures of a dream or nightmare. It will make you grateful for the courage of the author, and sorrowful for our History as it was made to be written.
~~
April 17, 2015
Perec’s novel is one of the most incredible, inventive, stupefying, humble, and devastating books to indirectly confront the Holocaust. A masterpiece, as this quote proves:
“How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it’s not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it’s not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That’s what there is, and that’s all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There’s no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There’s not even any hope that time will sort things out. There’s this, there’s what you’ve seen, and now and again it will be less horrible than what you’ve seen and now and again it will be much more horrible than what you’ve seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that’s what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true.” (p139-140)
“How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it’s not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it’s not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That’s what there is, and that’s all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There’s no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There’s not even any hope that time will sort things out. There’s this, there’s what you’ve seen, and now and again it will be less horrible than what you’ve seen and now and again it will be much more horrible than what you’ve seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that’s what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true.” (p139-140)
May 11, 2019
There are two worlds, the world of the Masters and the world of slaves. The Masters are unreachable, and the slaves tear at each other. But an Athlete of W does not even know that. He would rather believe in his Star. He waits for luck to smile on him.
He could easily fail, but Perec somehow managed to pull off a brilliant book.
This novel consists of two parallel stories told in two different parts. One of the stories is an autobiographical account of Perec's life as a Jewish boy in a German-occupied France during WW2, which in fact relies mostly on imagination and guess, and not so much on real memories; the other story is a tale about a man who deserted the army and came to live under the name of Gaspard Winckler, a name taken from a deaf-mute boy lost in a shipwreck near Patagonia. In the second half, Gaspard Winckler disappears and we get a matter-of-factly account of life on the island of W, a country located near Tierra del Fuego where the law takes the form of sports rules, thus creating a terrifying society.
Without ever mentioning the Holocaust, Perec builds an emotional, cathartic and superb narrative about loss and the arbitrariness of life and death under an authoritarian regime.
The translation by David Bellos is excellent.
He could easily fail, but Perec somehow managed to pull off a brilliant book.
This novel consists of two parallel stories told in two different parts. One of the stories is an autobiographical account of Perec's life as a Jewish boy in a German-occupied France during WW2, which in fact relies mostly on imagination and guess, and not so much on real memories; the other story is a tale about a man who deserted the army and came to live under the name of Gaspard Winckler, a name taken from a deaf-mute boy lost in a shipwreck near Patagonia. In the second half, Gaspard Winckler disappears and we get a matter-of-factly account of life on the island of W, a country located near Tierra del Fuego where the law takes the form of sports rules, thus creating a terrifying society.
Without ever mentioning the Holocaust, Perec builds an emotional, cathartic and superb narrative about loss and the arbitrariness of life and death under an authoritarian regime.
The translation by David Bellos is excellent.
November 30, 2010
'Kay, I guess this book was not bad. It kinda worked for me, but then again, it didn't.
I mean, this guy is George frigging Perec, the guy who wrote stuff like La Disparition and Espèces d'espaces, so he's really super intelligent. And this book is very well constructed.
There're two stories that are being told. One is Perec's own childhood as a Jewish child in occupied France. He escapes the camps by being placed in a Catholic boarding school (sort of like Louis Malle's Au revoir, les enfants but less tragic). The other story starts as a story of Gaspard Winckler, but then he drops out of the picture entirely and it becomes a fabulist description of an island off Tierra del Fuego devoted entirely to sports and the Olympic ideal.
The ending was shocking and moving and haunting, but it felt unsatisfying too, like I'd have to go back and read it again and again and again to tease out all the little details and symbols and games that he plays. I mean, the book is called "W", which in French is pronounced "doo-bleh-veh" and which sounds like "double vie" (double life). So, of course, you have this whole notion of a double life, which in one sense is reflected in twinned stories of the book, which in another is reflected in the fact that Perec's memories of his childhood are inconsistent with what his relatives and the objective evidence tell him, which is reflected in the fact that Winckler is clearly Perec's double, which is further reflected by the fact that Winckler himself has taken on the name of a mute child lost at sea around the fabulist island and is that child's double, which island is itself a double or stand-in for all the sorts of fascism in the world…
It's like a bloody hall of mirrors and I really don't wanna go and figure how it all works. It felt like a puzzle made by Escher and painted by Bacon. It might well be that if I did go delve into it, I'd love it as much as this guy did. But as it is, I'm not gonna. So, yeah… I liked it, but…
I guess you could say I'm in two minds about it.
I mean, this guy is George frigging Perec, the guy who wrote stuff like La Disparition and Espèces d'espaces, so he's really super intelligent. And this book is very well constructed.
There're two stories that are being told. One is Perec's own childhood as a Jewish child in occupied France. He escapes the camps by being placed in a Catholic boarding school (sort of like Louis Malle's Au revoir, les enfants but less tragic). The other story starts as a story of Gaspard Winckler, but then he drops out of the picture entirely and it becomes a fabulist description of an island off Tierra del Fuego devoted entirely to sports and the Olympic ideal.
The ending was shocking and moving and haunting, but it felt unsatisfying too, like I'd have to go back and read it again and again and again to tease out all the little details and symbols and games that he plays. I mean, the book is called "W", which in French is pronounced "doo-bleh-veh" and which sounds like "double vie" (double life). So, of course, you have this whole notion of a double life, which in one sense is reflected in twinned stories of the book, which in another is reflected in the fact that Perec's memories of his childhood are inconsistent with what his relatives and the objective evidence tell him, which is reflected in the fact that Winckler is clearly Perec's double, which is further reflected by the fact that Winckler himself has taken on the name of a mute child lost at sea around the fabulist island and is that child's double, which island is itself a double or stand-in for all the sorts of fascism in the world…
It's like a bloody hall of mirrors and I really don't wanna go and figure how it all works. It felt like a puzzle made by Escher and painted by Bacon. It might well be that if I did go delve into it, I'd love it as much as this guy did. But as it is, I'm not gonna. So, yeah… I liked it, but…
I guess you could say I'm in two minds about it.
July 1, 2020
I’ll blame garlic for my perforated slumber, such a gasping affair that I abandoned such and went to finish this disquieting exercise. Having read the Bellos, I was aware of the circumstances that led to Perec being an orphan, a shadow left capricious in the rumbling of the Shoah. Those illusory elements of his childhood haunted not just the author but the reader. His imagining of his parents with gentile names; it isn’t a slip of memory but a survival imperative. Those all memory becomes a palimpsest.
I imagine this book would have been explosive if I’d read it in my twenties.
I imagine this book would have been explosive if I’d read it in my twenties.
July 20, 2020
Georges Perec wrote this curious and affecting work between A Void and Life a User's Manual, still seeking to understand the Holocaust and the terrible impact it had on his life. "I re-read what I love," Perec writes at one point, "and love what I re-read". Sound advice, Mr P. So here I am, a decade later, reading this book again. It comprises two apparently unrelated narratives that unwind in alternating chapters, gradually entwining to great effect.
Why "W"? Well, for all sorts of reasons, it turns out. Firstly, it's wordplay with a tragic undertow - double-vee, la vie x 2, the lives of Perec's mother and father, extinguished by the National Socialist killing machine... And, as this most logophilic of writers explains, the V-twin of which "W" is composed may be reconstituted as "X" and, by certain adjustments, as a swastika and a Star of David. We may speculate endlessly. Perhaps it also connects to Warsaw/Warszawa, the city from which Perec and his relatives had arrived in Paris, location of the infamous ghetto and its doomed uprising.
It's nice to re-acquaint ourselves with Gaspard Winckler in the framing device of the "W" sections. "W" = Winckler? Ah, but is it a re-acquaintance? Is this the same Gaspard Winckler whom we met in Portrait of a Man and Life a User's Manual? Are any of them the same? Is GW nothing more than a convenient cypher for GP? It would seem so, since he disappears from the frame at the end.
The true nature of the society described in the "W" chapters is exposed through a drip-feed of sinister hints, descending by degrees from Olympic ideal to debased fascistic regime - "any fault, intentional or unwitting - a meaningless distinction on W - leads to automatic disqualification, in other words to defeat, a penalty of huge, not to say capital, importance"; "just as the spectators do not forgive an Athlete for losing"... The full horror of the genocidal, dictatorial regime is made apparent in the closing chapters. I'll let Perec do the talking, here, in the case of the losing contestant at the "Olympiads":
If the Gods are for him, if no one in the stadium shows a clenched fist with the thumb pointed down, he will probably save his skin and undergo only the same punishment as the other losers: like them, he will have to strip naked and run the gauntlet of the Judges armed with sticks and crops; like them, he will be put in the stocks, then paraded around the villages with a heavy, nail-studded, wooden yoke on his neck. But if one single spectator rises and points at him, calling down upon him the punishment meted out to the cowardly, then he will be put to death; the whole crowd will stone him, and his dismembered corpse will be displayed for three days in the villages, displayed on the butcher's hooks which hang on the main gates beneath the five entwined circles, beneath the proud motto of W - FORTIUS ALTIUS CITIUS - before being thrown to the dogs.
Gilead looks almost civilised in comparison to W:
Atlantiads are held about once a month. The women thought to be fertile are taken to the Central Stadium, their clothing is removed, and they are released onto the track, where they start to run as fast as they can. They are allowed a head start of half a lap before the best W Athletes, that is to say the best two in each event, making in all, as there are twenty-two events and four villages, one hundred and seventy-six men, are sent off in pursuit. One lap is usually all the runners need to catch up with the women, and as a rule it is right in front of the podium, either on the cinder track or on the grass, that they get raped.
Leaving aside The Hunger Games, Chapter Thirty is Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in miniature:
A teenage boy often has a magical notion of the world he is about to enter: the sadness he may feel on leaving his companions is mitigated by the sure fact that he will soon see them again... Once assigned to villages, children have at least three years as novices before they become Athletes. They join in the morning training sessions but not in the championships. The first six months of the noviciate, however, are spent in handcuffs and leg irons, and at night newcomers are chained to their beds, and often also gagged... Novices a little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what mustn't do. But usually they can't do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? ... That's what there is, and that's all.
Perec captures perfectly the hideous mixture of order and chaos in fascistic regimes, the lack of hope for those trapped inside, the total debasement visited upon them. The enumeration and explanations of the rules and hierarchy serve their purpose, revealing the madness that lies behind any "efficient" system of murder. There is even the blackest of humour at work in the titles the Athletes wear - "the Gustafson of Grunelius of Pfister of Cummings of Westerman-Casanova", for example. The Corinthian ethos has no part to play here, though. "W" is ruled by the spirit of the Falange and the Gestapo. Lest there be any doubt, Perec makes it clear whom he has in mind: "They must get out of the compounds - Raus! Raus! - They must start running - Schell! Schnell!" Nor is his target purely historic. As he notes. :
I have forgotten what reasons I had at the age of twelve for choosing Tierra del Fuego as the site of W. Pinochet's fascists have provided my fantasy with a final echo: several of the islands in that area are today deportation camps.
W is the perfect book to read in tandem with Sebald's Austerlitz. In both books, boys whose families have died in the Holocaust seek to retrieve their lost early childhood memories. There's a vital difference, of course; Perec's account is autobiographical. He finds that he can't trust his own memory; it has become an unreliable narrator. Childhood trauma has produced amnesia and distortion. Famously - well, at least among those of us who revere both writers - there's that heart-rending recollection in which the infant Perec waits at the Gare de Lyon to be evacuated and is bought a Charlie Chaplin comic by the mother he'll never see again. Sebald effectively quotes this episode, having Jacques Austerlitz be bought the same comic by his mother while awaiting evacuation at Praha Hlavní Nádraží. And just as Sebald recalled the impression made upon him by being shown photographs of the Holocaust as a schoolboy, so Perec recounts at the age of nine, being taken to an exhibition about the concentration camps where he sees "the walls of the gas chambers showing scratchmarks made by the victims' fingernails".
Subtly, Perec begins to weave his twin narratives more tightly together. "I paid no attention to... sporting champions, who, it must be said, had scarcely any opportunity to shine in those troubled times." The child is a refugee from a "W"-like regime that has destroyed his parents. His childhood experience is filled with disappointments and humiliations against a background of unspoken horror. It's the fate that awaits the children in "W".
Such is the moribund state of the Anglophone literary world - or the stuff that gets hyped and brought to our attention, at least - much of my reading takes place in translation (and in any case, why ignore an entire world outside?). I'm always curious about the challenge facing the translator, never more so than when rendering wordplay. ...to play on words, reads the translation at one point, "I one a rat, I two a rat, I three a rat, I four a rat, I five a rat, I six a rat, I seven a rat, I ate a rat". 'Surely, the original has to work better?' I found myself thinking. So I looked it up in my Gallimard edition. And sure enough, it does. It's about the Stations of the Cross. "Une gare, deux gares, trois gares, quatre gares, cinq gares, cigare!" The same goes for the second example, which is about magpies - pies bavardes - rather than questions. And so "What one? What two? What three? What four?" actually reads "Pie un, Pie deux, Pie trois, Pie quatre, Pie cinq, Pie six, Pissette!" - a far more convincingly childish corruption of prayers. In this regard, I'm glad I don't have the faculty to be a translator. As I've remarked before, Bellos is a master of his craft.
Pay no heed to the nay-sayers; this is Perec at the top of his game.
Why "W"? Well, for all sorts of reasons, it turns out. Firstly, it's wordplay with a tragic undertow - double-vee, la vie x 2, the lives of Perec's mother and father, extinguished by the National Socialist killing machine... And, as this most logophilic of writers explains, the V-twin of which "W" is composed may be reconstituted as "X" and, by certain adjustments, as a swastika and a Star of David. We may speculate endlessly. Perhaps it also connects to Warsaw/Warszawa, the city from which Perec and his relatives had arrived in Paris, location of the infamous ghetto and its doomed uprising.
It's nice to re-acquaint ourselves with Gaspard Winckler in the framing device of the "W" sections. "W" = Winckler? Ah, but is it a re-acquaintance? Is this the same Gaspard Winckler whom we met in Portrait of a Man and Life a User's Manual? Are any of them the same? Is GW nothing more than a convenient cypher for GP? It would seem so, since he disappears from the frame at the end.
The true nature of the society described in the "W" chapters is exposed through a drip-feed of sinister hints, descending by degrees from Olympic ideal to debased fascistic regime - "any fault, intentional or unwitting - a meaningless distinction on W - leads to automatic disqualification, in other words to defeat, a penalty of huge, not to say capital, importance"; "just as the spectators do not forgive an Athlete for losing"... The full horror of the genocidal, dictatorial regime is made apparent in the closing chapters. I'll let Perec do the talking, here, in the case of the losing contestant at the "Olympiads":
If the Gods are for him, if no one in the stadium shows a clenched fist with the thumb pointed down, he will probably save his skin and undergo only the same punishment as the other losers: like them, he will have to strip naked and run the gauntlet of the Judges armed with sticks and crops; like them, he will be put in the stocks, then paraded around the villages with a heavy, nail-studded, wooden yoke on his neck. But if one single spectator rises and points at him, calling down upon him the punishment meted out to the cowardly, then he will be put to death; the whole crowd will stone him, and his dismembered corpse will be displayed for three days in the villages, displayed on the butcher's hooks which hang on the main gates beneath the five entwined circles, beneath the proud motto of W - FORTIUS ALTIUS CITIUS - before being thrown to the dogs.
Gilead looks almost civilised in comparison to W:
Atlantiads are held about once a month. The women thought to be fertile are taken to the Central Stadium, their clothing is removed, and they are released onto the track, where they start to run as fast as they can. They are allowed a head start of half a lap before the best W Athletes, that is to say the best two in each event, making in all, as there are twenty-two events and four villages, one hundred and seventy-six men, are sent off in pursuit. One lap is usually all the runners need to catch up with the women, and as a rule it is right in front of the podium, either on the cinder track or on the grass, that they get raped.
Leaving aside The Hunger Games, Chapter Thirty is Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in miniature:
A teenage boy often has a magical notion of the world he is about to enter: the sadness he may feel on leaving his companions is mitigated by the sure fact that he will soon see them again... Once assigned to villages, children have at least three years as novices before they become Athletes. They join in the morning training sessions but not in the championships. The first six months of the noviciate, however, are spent in handcuffs and leg irons, and at night newcomers are chained to their beds, and often also gagged... Novices a little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what mustn't do. But usually they can't do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? ... That's what there is, and that's all.
Perec captures perfectly the hideous mixture of order and chaos in fascistic regimes, the lack of hope for those trapped inside, the total debasement visited upon them. The enumeration and explanations of the rules and hierarchy serve their purpose, revealing the madness that lies behind any "efficient" system of murder. There is even the blackest of humour at work in the titles the Athletes wear - "the Gustafson of Grunelius of Pfister of Cummings of Westerman-Casanova", for example. The Corinthian ethos has no part to play here, though. "W" is ruled by the spirit of the Falange and the Gestapo. Lest there be any doubt, Perec makes it clear whom he has in mind: "They must get out of the compounds - Raus! Raus! - They must start running - Schell! Schnell!" Nor is his target purely historic. As he notes. :
I have forgotten what reasons I had at the age of twelve for choosing Tierra del Fuego as the site of W. Pinochet's fascists have provided my fantasy with a final echo: several of the islands in that area are today deportation camps.
W is the perfect book to read in tandem with Sebald's Austerlitz. In both books, boys whose families have died in the Holocaust seek to retrieve their lost early childhood memories. There's a vital difference, of course; Perec's account is autobiographical. He finds that he can't trust his own memory; it has become an unreliable narrator. Childhood trauma has produced amnesia and distortion. Famously - well, at least among those of us who revere both writers - there's that heart-rending recollection in which the infant Perec waits at the Gare de Lyon to be evacuated and is bought a Charlie Chaplin comic by the mother he'll never see again. Sebald effectively quotes this episode, having Jacques Austerlitz be bought the same comic by his mother while awaiting evacuation at Praha Hlavní Nádraží. And just as Sebald recalled the impression made upon him by being shown photographs of the Holocaust as a schoolboy, so Perec recounts at the age of nine, being taken to an exhibition about the concentration camps where he sees "the walls of the gas chambers showing scratchmarks made by the victims' fingernails".
Subtly, Perec begins to weave his twin narratives more tightly together. "I paid no attention to... sporting champions, who, it must be said, had scarcely any opportunity to shine in those troubled times." The child is a refugee from a "W"-like regime that has destroyed his parents. His childhood experience is filled with disappointments and humiliations against a background of unspoken horror. It's the fate that awaits the children in "W".
Such is the moribund state of the Anglophone literary world - or the stuff that gets hyped and brought to our attention, at least - much of my reading takes place in translation (and in any case, why ignore an entire world outside?). I'm always curious about the challenge facing the translator, never more so than when rendering wordplay. ...to play on words, reads the translation at one point, "I one a rat, I two a rat, I three a rat, I four a rat, I five a rat, I six a rat, I seven a rat, I ate a rat". 'Surely, the original has to work better?' I found myself thinking. So I looked it up in my Gallimard edition. And sure enough, it does. It's about the Stations of the Cross. "Une gare, deux gares, trois gares, quatre gares, cinq gares, cigare!" The same goes for the second example, which is about magpies - pies bavardes - rather than questions. And so "What one? What two? What three? What four?" actually reads "Pie un, Pie deux, Pie trois, Pie quatre, Pie cinq, Pie six, Pissette!" - a far more convincingly childish corruption of prayers. In this regard, I'm glad I don't have the faculty to be a translator. As I've remarked before, Bellos is a master of his craft.
Pay no heed to the nay-sayers; this is Perec at the top of his game.
January 14, 2020
Perec’ten iki bölümlü mükemmel bir kitap. Çocukluk çağlarına ait otobiyografik anlatı ve çocuklukta yazdığı bir öyküye dayanarak geliştirilen ütopik (hatta distopik) bir kurmaca öykü.
Bir Polonya yahudisi olup annesini nazi toplama kamplarında babasını ise savaşta kaybetmiş olan Perec II. Dünya Savaşı’nı çocukluğunda yaşamıştır. 5-6 yaşlarında başlayan bulanık anılarını kendine özgü matematiksel bir dille anlatıyor. Tüm Perec kitaplarında olduğu gibi muhteşem akıcı bir dile ve kurguya sahip.
Çocukluk anılarını neden yazdığını şöyle anlatıyor Perec ; “... yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: “
Kurgusal bölümü 13 yaşında yazdığı bir öyküden esinlenerek yeniden yazmıştır, bu öyküde hatırladığı W ülkesinde sporun herşey olduğu ve yönetim şeklinin buna dayandığıdır. Bu öyküyü Ateş Ülkesi denilen yere uyarlamasının Şili’deki faşist Pinochet rejiminden kaynaklandığını belirtiyor yazar.
Elindeki kimi fotoğraflardan, belgelerden ve diğer izlerden oluşan çocukluk anılarını çocukken yazdığı öykü ile birbirini takip eden bölümlerle kurgulamış, kitabın başlarında birbiriyleriyle ilgisi yokmuş gibi görünen bölümler satırlar ilerledikçe örtüşmeye nihayet kitabın sonuna doğru gelince bu bölümlerin, Perec'in hayatında, nasıl bir rol oynadıkları ortaya çıkıyor.
W ülkesindeki totaliter rejim Nazi Almanya’sına, spor ve oyunlar ise toplama kamplarındaki yaşama göndermelerdir. Yahudiliğin o yıllardaki durumunu anlatan Perec öksüz kaldıktan sonra, nazilerden kurtulması ve yaşaması için gönderildiği Fransa’nın da SS’ler tarafından işgal edilmesi karşısında hristiyanlaştırılıp vaftiz edilmesi dahil bir sürü olayı anlatıyor.
Bence okunması gereken bir kitap.
ımiçin savaşın
Bir Polonya yahudisi olup annesini nazi toplama kamplarında babasını ise savaşta kaybetmiş olan Perec II. Dünya Savaşı’nı çocukluğunda yaşamıştır. 5-6 yaşlarında başlayan bulanık anılarını kendine özgü matematiksel bir dille anlatıyor. Tüm Perec kitaplarında olduğu gibi muhteşem akıcı bir dile ve kurguya sahip.
Çocukluk anılarını neden yazdığını şöyle anlatıyor Perec ; “... yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: “
Kurgusal bölümü 13 yaşında yazdığı bir öyküden esinlenerek yeniden yazmıştır, bu öyküde hatırladığı W ülkesinde sporun herşey olduğu ve yönetim şeklinin buna dayandığıdır. Bu öyküyü Ateş Ülkesi denilen yere uyarlamasının Şili’deki faşist Pinochet rejiminden kaynaklandığını belirtiyor yazar.
Elindeki kimi fotoğraflardan, belgelerden ve diğer izlerden oluşan çocukluk anılarını çocukken yazdığı öykü ile birbirini takip eden bölümlerle kurgulamış, kitabın başlarında birbiriyleriyle ilgisi yokmuş gibi görünen bölümler satırlar ilerledikçe örtüşmeye nihayet kitabın sonuna doğru gelince bu bölümlerin, Perec'in hayatında, nasıl bir rol oynadıkları ortaya çıkıyor.
W ülkesindeki totaliter rejim Nazi Almanya’sına, spor ve oyunlar ise toplama kamplarındaki yaşama göndermelerdir. Yahudiliğin o yıllardaki durumunu anlatan Perec öksüz kaldıktan sonra, nazilerden kurtulması ve yaşaması için gönderildiği Fransa’nın da SS’ler tarafından işgal edilmesi karşısında hristiyanlaştırılıp vaftiz edilmesi dahil bir sürü olayı anlatıyor.
Bence okunması gereken bir kitap.
ımiçin savaşın
February 28, 2014
Georges Perec's death in his mid-forties was almost as big a loss for the world of French literature as the similarly early death of Albert Camus. His was a most rich and creative mind, as his complex novel "Life, a User's Novel" probably best illustrates. "W," the short novel/autobiography under review here, like the French "double V," is made up of two connected narratives, presented in alternating chapters. One is comprised of fragmentary memories from Perec's childhood as an orphaned Jew, whose father died in the early years of the War and whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz. The frequent moves and shifting faces he recalls from his childhood have as result that he cannot quite place himself, cannot quite be sure of what really happened and, indeed, who he is. The other narrative is of an imaginary island where everything is organized around sport. The more we learn of this island the more dystopian and horrific it becomes. Clearly Perec is satirizing the Germany of his time, where everything is sacrificed for victory, although the question of victory for whom is never entirely clear. This small book is very much worth the short time it takes to read and Perec's dystopia is no less horrific than Orwell's "1984."
May 13, 2022
En W o el recuerdo de la infancia Perec cuenta dos historias en paralelo. Por un lado intenta de alguna manera reconstruir la memoria de su infancia, una infancia en medio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial de la que en realidad recuerda poco y nada. Y por otro lado le da forma a una historia que había imaginado cuando apenas tenía trece años sobre una isla regida completamente sobre las bases del deporte olímpico y sus constantes competiciones como forma de orden social.
Me pareció muy interesante el contraste entre ambas historias y como en un punto terminan convergiendo. Perec nos habla de holocausto y de nazismo sin abordarlos directamente, pero lo hace con una naturalidad que conmueve.
George Perec quedó huérfano en 1942 cuando tenía apenas seis años. Su padre falleció luchando en el ejercito francés y su madre en Auschwitz.
“No escribo para decir que no tengo nada que decir. Escribo: escribo porque nosotros hemos vivido juntos, porque he sido unos entre ellos, sombra entre sus sombras, cuerpo cerca de sus cuerpos; escribo porque ellos han dejado en mí su marca indeleble y porque su rastro es la escritura; la escritura es el recuerdo de su muerte y la afirmación de mi vida”
Me pareció muy interesante el contraste entre ambas historias y como en un punto terminan convergiendo. Perec nos habla de holocausto y de nazismo sin abordarlos directamente, pero lo hace con una naturalidad que conmueve.
George Perec quedó huérfano en 1942 cuando tenía apenas seis años. Su padre falleció luchando en el ejercito francés y su madre en Auschwitz.
“No escribo para decir que no tengo nada que decir. Escribo: escribo porque nosotros hemos vivido juntos, porque he sido unos entre ellos, sombra entre sus sombras, cuerpo cerca de sus cuerpos; escribo porque ellos han dejado en mí su marca indeleble y porque su rastro es la escritura; la escritura es el recuerdo de su muerte y la afirmación de mi vida”
December 30, 2021
Neįtikėtinai puiki, tokia, kaip ir Pereco Life, kur reikia truputį pavargti, bet galiausiai užima kvapą. Knygelė trumpa, nuo pat pradžių pakaitomis paskyriui eina du pasakojimai (stačiu šriftu ir kursyvu), jau įvade mums pasakoma, kad vienas pasakojimas - biografija, o kitas - fikcinė istorija apie paslaptingą salą - šalį W, tokia "olympic dream" (pasakoja, kaip ten klesti sporto kultas, įvairiausios rungtynės ir pan).
Autobiografinis Pereco pasakojimas liūdnas - tai pasakojimas žmogaus, kuris neturi praeities, beveik neturi prisiminimų, kurio tėvai mirė (mama Aušwice) dar jam mažam esant, kuris buvo perkėlinėjamas iš vieno internato į kitą, nuo vienos tetos kitai. Ką jis turi - tai tėvų nuotraukos ir galimi faktai apie juos, jis tyrinėja fotografijas ir bando susikurti juos sau, susikurti tą neturėtą waikystę. Stilistiškai tai atsiduria kažkur tarp "Austerlico", "Life" ir Johno Bergerio tekstų apie fotografijas - daug statikos, klaidžiojimo po įsivaizduojamą praeitį, spekuliacijos, sapno ir liūdesio.
Antras siužetas didžiojoj daly knygos man buvo pusiau mistika: pasakotoją nepažįstamas žmogus prašo surasti Gaspard'ą Wincklerį (tai juk žaislų ir puzlų kūrėjas iš Pereco "Life", kuris mirė, dėdamas raidę W!). Paskui šita pati linija virsta fikcinės šalies aprašinėjimu, kur visas gyvenimas grįstas sportu, keisčiausiom varžybom (pralaimėjusius gali nušauti, bet gali ir nenušauti, laimėtojai gauna moterų, bet laimėjimas labai keistai nustatomas, nebūtinai pagal stiprumą ar greitumą etc, pusė rugnčių atrodo kaip patyčios iš atletų). Kuo toliau, tuo sunkiau suprantama, negalėjau įsikirsti - kas čia per sportai ir kodėl. Iki galo, kol staiga iš įvairių ženklų (dryžuotos uniformos, išbalę veidai, visur mirtis) paaiškėja, kieno alegorija yra šita išgalwota, tikrai netikrowiška būtis, nes juk negali būti tikras, suwokiamas dalykas šitoks buwimas? -
Taip, pačiam gale, susijungia abi istorijos: berniuko, kuris neturi praeities, ir "fikcinės" - pernelyg neįtikėtinos, kad būtų tiesa - šalies, kuri iš jo tą praeitį atėmė. Wisa alegorija iki galo niekaip neišsiriša, jis taip tiesiai neįvardija, kas yra tie atletai su keistais treningais, kas tie jų Waldytojai, ką reiškia tas sportas, kuris tawe labai greitai nužudo. Kai tu jau supranti - kaip ir bet kokia alegorija, pasidaro skausminga ir šiurpu. Tikra traumos literatūra, nei ją išveikianti, nei išpasakojanti ar verčianti tave ją išgyventi, paimituoti. Nes tu nelabai ir gali, ne iš tavęs ji atėmė wiską. Tiesiog tikra literatūra.
Vis skaitydavau tuos debatus, kas geriau - Littelo Maloningosios ar Binet HHhH, kaip kalbėti apie tai, kas nekalbama, kur čia yra vieta fikcijai, ar jos reikia, ar ji tik užmuilina dalykus, kuriuos neaišku kaip artikuliuoti. O Perecas visa tai, pasirodo, jau parašė 1975-ais. Kodėl šita knyga nėra išversta??? Ji turi nemažai Austerlico sapniškumo, bet neturi galimai šiurpokos Austerlico istorijos (kaip Sebaldas, sako, paėmė jam be tikslo publikuoti papasakotą liudijimą). Ir labai daug neturėtos, susikurtos biografijos liūdesio. Must read. Iš tų knygų, kurios kažką neramaus, bet swarbaus tau padaro.
Autobiografinis Pereco pasakojimas liūdnas - tai pasakojimas žmogaus, kuris neturi praeities, beveik neturi prisiminimų, kurio tėvai mirė (mama Aušwice) dar jam mažam esant, kuris buvo perkėlinėjamas iš vieno internato į kitą, nuo vienos tetos kitai. Ką jis turi - tai tėvų nuotraukos ir galimi faktai apie juos, jis tyrinėja fotografijas ir bando susikurti juos sau, susikurti tą neturėtą waikystę. Stilistiškai tai atsiduria kažkur tarp "Austerlico", "Life" ir Johno Bergerio tekstų apie fotografijas - daug statikos, klaidžiojimo po įsivaizduojamą praeitį, spekuliacijos, sapno ir liūdesio.
Antras siužetas didžiojoj daly knygos man buvo pusiau mistika: pasakotoją nepažįstamas žmogus prašo surasti Gaspard'ą Wincklerį (tai juk žaislų ir puzlų kūrėjas iš Pereco "Life", kuris mirė, dėdamas raidę W!). Paskui šita pati linija virsta fikcinės šalies aprašinėjimu, kur visas gyvenimas grįstas sportu, keisčiausiom varžybom (pralaimėjusius gali nušauti, bet gali ir nenušauti, laimėtojai gauna moterų, bet laimėjimas labai keistai nustatomas, nebūtinai pagal stiprumą ar greitumą etc, pusė rugnčių atrodo kaip patyčios iš atletų). Kuo toliau, tuo sunkiau suprantama, negalėjau įsikirsti - kas čia per sportai ir kodėl. Iki galo, kol staiga iš įvairių ženklų (dryžuotos uniformos, išbalę veidai, visur mirtis) paaiškėja, kieno alegorija yra šita išgalwota, tikrai netikrowiška būtis, nes juk negali būti tikras, suwokiamas dalykas šitoks buwimas? -
How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There's no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There's not even any hope that time will sort things out. There's this, there's what you've seen, and now and again it will be less horrible than what you've seen and now and again it will be much more horrible than what you've seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true. (p. 139-140)
But we know the world of W well enough to grasp that its most lenient Laws are but the expression of a greater and more savage irony. The apparent leniency of the rules governing promotion to official positions always comes up against the whimsicality of the Hierarchy: what a Timekeeper proposes, a Referee may refuse; what a Referee promises, a Judge may forbid; what a Judge proposes, a Manager disposes; what one Manager grants, another may disallow. High Officials have all the power; they can sanction, just as they can veto; they can uphold the choice of fate, or choose a different fatality, at random; they make the decisions, and they can change them at any time. (p. 154)
If you just look at the Athletes, if you just look: in their striped gear they look like caricatures of turn-of-the-century sportsmen as, with their elbows in, they lunge in a grotesque sprint; if you just look at the shot-putters, who have cannonballs for shot, at the jumpers with their ankles tied, at the long jumpers thudding into a sandpit filled with manure [...], if you just look and see these Athletes of skin and bone, ashen-faced, their backs permanently bent, their skulls bald and shiny, their eyes full of panic, and their sores suppurating, if you see all these indelible marks of humiliation without end, of boundless terror, all of it evidence, administered every hour, every day, every instant, of conscious, organized, structured oppression; if you just look and see the workings of this huge machine, each cog of which contributes with implacable efficiency to the systematic annihilation of men [...]. (p. 161)
Taip, pačiam gale, susijungia abi istorijos: berniuko, kuris neturi praeities, ir "fikcinės" - pernelyg neįtikėtinos, kad būtų tiesa - šalies, kuri iš jo tą praeitį atėmė. Wisa alegorija iki galo niekaip neišsiriša, jis taip tiesiai neįvardija, kas yra tie atletai su keistais treningais, kas tie jų Waldytojai, ką reiškia tas sportas, kuris tawe labai greitai nužudo. Kai tu jau supranti - kaip ir bet kokia alegorija, pasidaro skausminga ir šiurpu. Tikra traumos literatūra, nei ją išveikianti, nei išpasakojanti ar verčianti tave ją išgyventi, paimituoti. Nes tu nelabai ir gali, ne iš tavęs ji atėmė wiską. Tiesiog tikra literatūra.
Vis skaitydavau tuos debatus, kas geriau - Littelo Maloningosios ar Binet HHhH, kaip kalbėti apie tai, kas nekalbama, kur čia yra vieta fikcijai, ar jos reikia, ar ji tik užmuilina dalykus, kuriuos neaišku kaip artikuliuoti. O Perecas visa tai, pasirodo, jau parašė 1975-ais. Kodėl šita knyga nėra išversta??? Ji turi nemažai Austerlico sapniškumo, bet neturi galimai šiurpokos Austerlico istorijos (kaip Sebaldas, sako, paėmė jam be tikslo publikuoti papasakotą liudijimą). Ir labai daug neturėtos, susikurtos biografijos liūdesio. Must read. Iš tų knygų, kurios kažką neramaus, bet swarbaus tau padaro.
August 10, 2012
UPDATE: For those of you who've caught Olympic fever, this is the novel to read after the games. It'll shade your memory of the decathlon and many other track & field events. Perec's book has been haunting me in unexpected ways as I tune into the coverage.
4.5 stars. An affecting mix of autobiographical fragments, a page-turning mystery involving a strange letter, and a slightly schematic description of a society of athletes. These parallel narratives deal with the unreliable nature of memory, the seductions of storytelling, and the spaces in between - which is exactly where this tale really takes place. The Holocaust is rarely spoken about directly and you get the sense that Perec doesn't want to be defined by it, but that it's also marked his life deeply in ways which he struggles to express. The most piercing parts of "W" are what remain unsaid and unsayable, but are relayed to the reader through hints, evasions, and unexpected correspondences.
4.5 stars. An affecting mix of autobiographical fragments, a page-turning mystery involving a strange letter, and a slightly schematic description of a society of athletes. These parallel narratives deal with the unreliable nature of memory, the seductions of storytelling, and the spaces in between - which is exactly where this tale really takes place. The Holocaust is rarely spoken about directly and you get the sense that Perec doesn't want to be defined by it, but that it's also marked his life deeply in ways which he struggles to express. The most piercing parts of "W" are what remain unsaid and unsayable, but are relayed to the reader through hints, evasions, and unexpected correspondences.
January 5, 2024
Di luoghi, cose e persone, nomi che si aggrumano come apparizioni in cerca di ricordi: W si compone di tre libri apparentemente slegati tra loro (l'autobiografia di Perec, un poliziesco su scambi d'identità e scomparse, e uno studio etnografico che è scheletro per un distopico e tentativo di feuilleton), li interseca in modo arbitrario e lascia al lettore la piena libertà di scegliere se giocare o meno.
Il lettore che gioca è pronto a scontrarsi con passati fantasma che lo inseguono nelle strade di città da maiuscole e punti senza nomi, lettere spioventi nella circolarità del tempo infinito-indecifrabile, memorie di altri che ricorda come sue e storie di futuri indefiniti mesi in grembo, rimorsi di un'infanzia scolorita, narrazioni slegate tra loro, che spera poi si leghino come nel destino a cui mai si potrà cedere.
Il destino è una Legge imprevedibile che non ammette ignoranza, ma è inconoscibile: presuppone che tu ne accetti il Caso, sua componente inscindibile.
(Solo per chi mastica il labirinto di memorie autobiografiche di Perec. I novizi, come me, ne hanno di strada da fare.)
Il lettore che gioca è pronto a scontrarsi con passati fantasma che lo inseguono nelle strade di città da maiuscole e punti senza nomi, lettere spioventi nella circolarità del tempo infinito-indecifrabile, memorie di altri che ricorda come sue e storie di futuri indefiniti mesi in grembo, rimorsi di un'infanzia scolorita, narrazioni slegate tra loro, che spera poi si leghino come nel destino a cui mai si potrà cedere.
Il destino è una Legge imprevedibile che non ammette ignoranza, ma è inconoscibile: presuppone che tu ne accetti il Caso, sua componente inscindibile.
(Solo per chi mastica il labirinto di memorie autobiografiche di Perec. I novizi, come me, ne hanno di strada da fare.)
March 13, 2024
“Çocukluk hatıram yok.”
Bu iddiayı kendinden emin bir şekilde, neredeyse meydan okurcasına ortaya koyuyor George Perec. Kendi kişisel öyküsüne büyük tırpanıyla Tarih çoktan cevap veriyor çünkü; savaş ve kamplar.
Hatırasız (?) çocukluğunun sessizliğini yazıyla bir nevi kurguluyor ve diyor ki:
“Yazıyorum; yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: hatıraları yazıda öldü; yazı onların ölümünün hatırası ve benim hayatımın olumlanması.”
Ne kadar etkileyici ya da ben etkilendim…. Duygular bir yana çocukluğumuzun hatıraları, hatırladıklarımız sanki beraber yaşadıklarımızın anlattıklarıyla örülmüş gibi. Sonradan anlatıla anlatıla sesle örülmüş gibi… Hatırlamanın kurgusu gibi.
…
Oggito dergide çevrilmiş çok güzel bir söyleşisi var George Perec’in. Meraklısına:)
Bu iddiayı kendinden emin bir şekilde, neredeyse meydan okurcasına ortaya koyuyor George Perec. Kendi kişisel öyküsüne büyük tırpanıyla Tarih çoktan cevap veriyor çünkü; savaş ve kamplar.
Hatırasız (?) çocukluğunun sessizliğini yazıyla bir nevi kurguluyor ve diyor ki:
“Yazıyorum; yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: hatıraları yazıda öldü; yazı onların ölümünün hatırası ve benim hayatımın olumlanması.”
Ne kadar etkileyici ya da ben etkilendim…. Duygular bir yana çocukluğumuzun hatıraları, hatırladıklarımız sanki beraber yaşadıklarımızın anlattıklarıyla örülmüş gibi. Sonradan anlatıla anlatıla sesle örülmüş gibi… Hatırlamanın kurgusu gibi.
…
Oggito dergide çevrilmiş çok güzel bir söyleşisi var George Perec’in. Meraklısına:)
February 21, 2016
Çok iyi be. Perec, her zamanki gibi çok iyi.
Aslında kitabın ikinci bölümü, ilk önce bir hayli sıkıcı geldi; More'un Ütopya'sının sportif bir versiyonuydu zira, W ülkesinde anlatılan. Oysa satırlar ilerledikçe iş nasıl da değişti, nasıl da istediği yere yavaş yavaş getirdi lafı Perec!
Paralel ilerleyen anılar kısmı da, bir 'envanter üstadı' olarak bildiğimiz Perec'in kusursuz anlatımıyla doluydu. Hakkında bir dolu şey öğrendim ayrıca, mesela en başta, aslında Polonyalı olduğunu (bunu bilmemek belki de benim ayıbımdı). Ayrıca babasının savaşta, annesinin de -muhtemelen- Auschwitz'de gaz odalarında ölmüş olduğunu, bu sırada Perec'in 6 yaşında olduğunu... Zaten 46 yaşında da, gencecik öldü, garibim.
Ve tekrar; W ülkesinin zalim yöneticilerini aktarırken, orada ezilenlere de bir parantez açıyordu ve biraz da eleştiriyordu, belki de haklıydı:
"İki dünya vardır, Efendilerinki ve kölelerinki. Efendilerin yanlarına bile ulaşılmaz, köleler ise birbirini parçalar. Ama W Atleti bunu bile bilmez. Kendi Yıldızına inanmayı tercih eder. Talihin yüzüne gülmesini bekler. Günün birinde İlahlar onunla olacak, doğru numarayı çekecek, Olimpiyat Ateşini ana meşaleye kadar götürmek için kaderin seçtiği kişi olacak, bu ona resmi Işık Taşıyıcı payesini verecek ve böylece onu daima her türlü angaryadan muaf tutacak, ilke olarak ona daimi bir koruma sağlayacaktır."
Ve yani, ancak tanrısal bir kuvvet, onları gaz odalarından kurtarabilecektir! Bu herkesin kulağına küpe olması gereken bir antikadercilik anlayışı. Ama kaderi kabullenmek kolay, başkaldırmak zor, evet.
Bir de, çocukluk anılarını neden yazdığına dair güzel bir kısım var.
"Bir şey söyleyemeyeceğimi söylemek için yazmıyorum, söyleyecek bir şeyim olmadığını söylemek için yazmıyorum. Yazıyorum; yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: hatıraları yazıda öldü; yazı onların ölümünün hatırası ve benim hayatımın olumlanması."
Sözkonusu Perec'se, bir kitabı hem "anı", hem de "kurmaca" kategorisine de sokabilirim ayrıca!
Aslında kitabın ikinci bölümü, ilk önce bir hayli sıkıcı geldi; More'un Ütopya'sının sportif bir versiyonuydu zira, W ülkesinde anlatılan. Oysa satırlar ilerledikçe iş nasıl da değişti, nasıl da istediği yere yavaş yavaş getirdi lafı Perec!
Paralel ilerleyen anılar kısmı da, bir 'envanter üstadı' olarak bildiğimiz Perec'in kusursuz anlatımıyla doluydu. Hakkında bir dolu şey öğrendim ayrıca, mesela en başta, aslında Polonyalı olduğunu (bunu bilmemek belki de benim ayıbımdı). Ayrıca babasının savaşta, annesinin de -muhtemelen- Auschwitz'de gaz odalarında ölmüş olduğunu, bu sırada Perec'in 6 yaşında olduğunu... Zaten 46 yaşında da, gencecik öldü, garibim.
Ve tekrar; W ülkesinin zalim yöneticilerini aktarırken, orada ezilenlere de bir parantez açıyordu ve biraz da eleştiriyordu, belki de haklıydı:
"İki dünya vardır, Efendilerinki ve kölelerinki. Efendilerin yanlarına bile ulaşılmaz, köleler ise birbirini parçalar. Ama W Atleti bunu bile bilmez. Kendi Yıldızına inanmayı tercih eder. Talihin yüzüne gülmesini bekler. Günün birinde İlahlar onunla olacak, doğru numarayı çekecek, Olimpiyat Ateşini ana meşaleye kadar götürmek için kaderin seçtiği kişi olacak, bu ona resmi Işık Taşıyıcı payesini verecek ve böylece onu daima her türlü angaryadan muaf tutacak, ilke olarak ona daimi bir koruma sağlayacaktır."
Ve yani, ancak tanrısal bir kuvvet, onları gaz odalarından kurtarabilecektir! Bu herkesin kulağına küpe olması gereken bir antikadercilik anlayışı. Ama kaderi kabullenmek kolay, başkaldırmak zor, evet.
Bir de, çocukluk anılarını neden yazdığına dair güzel bir kısım var.
"Bir şey söyleyemeyeceğimi söylemek için yazmıyorum, söyleyecek bir şeyim olmadığını söylemek için yazmıyorum. Yazıyorum; yazıyorum çünkü birlikte yaşadık, çünkü onlardan biriydim, onların gölgelerinin ortasında bir gölge, onların bedenlerinin yanı başında bir bedendim; yazıyorum çünkü onlar bende silinmez izlerini bıraktılar ve bu iz de yazı: hatıraları yazıda öldü; yazı onların ölümünün hatırası ve benim hayatımın olumlanması."
Sözkonusu Perec'se, bir kitabı hem "anı", hem de "kurmaca" kategorisine de sokabilirim ayrıca!
January 14, 2019
120119: in looking at oulipo books read, i have decided to rate them again without reading but given some little bit more theory. as always the art is the art and everything else is everything else. and this works for me, possibly more before it is ‘explained’ as referring to trauma of hiding from nazis in Swiss boarding school(?)...or whatever. simply, this recount of that isolate isle ‘w’ and its cult of physical games with psychological results, is abstract, fascinating, horrific, with no needed reference or allusion to horrors of our ‘real’ world...
August 27, 2011
Five total pages of five-star Perecian prose? The memoir stuff seemed truthful yet underdeveloped? The Kafkan report on the Darwinian society of uber athletes at times kicked some serious scary allegorical ass (pre-race battling and the spoils of victory) but often felt numerically obsessive/flat, which makes sense I guess as a way to approach the extreme systemic rationality built over the extreme demonic irrationality of Nazi atrocity, but still, not so hot to read? The tenuous connection between the conjoined V's of the story suggests the fragility of youth, family, and memory overwhelmed by ungrappled-with forces related to the WWII/Holocaust, his father's death as a solider fighting for France and his mother's death at Auschwitz when he was still very young. It's more than just stray bits of childhood memoir and allegory about athletes on some island off the coast of Tierra del Fuego. There's also a semi-confounding story at the beginning about a shipwrecked family and how the narrator assumed the name of someone lost at sea. And a tale about the island of W written when the author was very young. Overall, this seemed to me nowhere near as good as Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep and, particularly, Life: A User's Manual: Revised Edition, one of the most impressive, "life"-affirming books I've ever read. Perec lost his parents to a horrific, elaborate system and spent his life bringing life to prose using joyful, elaborate systems. This book, despite indirectly addressing his parents' deaths, wasn't up to the other stuff I've read by him. A sort of enjoyable and at times almost moving/dramatic read, but didn't seem in the same league as other indirect fictional approaches to the Holocaust/WWII like See Under: Love and Garden, Ashes? Might interest fans of Houllebecq's The Possibility of an Island since the alternating structure is similar. Lanzarote also reminded me of the island of W. somewhat. (Note: lots less gnarly sex in Perec's stuff.)
December 16, 2015
Second half brings it home. What starts out as an attempt at clearing bleary recollection and memory of lineage becomes a story (as per the composite of the two) of how "bigger" and far more unjust forces--in this case, the cruelty of rules and whimsies in W, and the Holocaust--eclipse the particularities and curiosities of one's individual life, the truth or immovability of which continues to persist despite its apparent and revolting menace.
"How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There's no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There's not even any hope that time will sort things out. There's this, there's what you've seen, and now and again it will be less horrible than what you've seen and now and again it will be much more horrible than what you've seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true."
"How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all. There are competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There's no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There's not even any hope that time will sort things out. There's this, there's what you've seen, and now and again it will be less horrible than what you've seen and now and again it will be much more horrible than what you've seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true."
December 24, 2022
C'est un livre magnifique que j'ai relu avec plaisir, mais moins d'empressement que la première fois.
La partie autobiographique m'a toutefois beaucoup plus impressionnée à la seconde lecture. La construction de la mémoire par l'écriture, problème classique de l'autobiographie ressassée depuis Saint-Simon prend ici des allures différentes. La mémoire fait constamment défaut. Le narrateur cherche dans les artéfacts de sa jeunesse, vieilles photos ou lieux revisités dans les années 70, le souvenir de son enfance. Les deux correspondent rarement: les photos lui montrent des événements dont il ne se rappelle pas, les amis retrouvés lui racontent un souvenir qui appartient en réalité à un camarade d'école, et d'autres souvenir lui reviennent, inventés de toute pièce d'après des bouts de littérature empruntés à Hugo ou Mallot, à Roussel ou Queneau. Le texte est pétri de conditionnel et de "ou", qui marquent un doute profond dans l'histoire personnelle et fragmentaire de Perec.
Le projet d'écriture:
"Je ne retrouverai jamais dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture, le scandale de leur silence et de mon silence : je n’écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire. J’écris : j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps ; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l’écriture : leur souvenir est mort à l’écriture : l’écriture et le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie."
L'écriture est participative, elle permet de prendre part à la Grande Histoire, si imposante qu'elle en a oblitéré la petite histoire de Perec. Et le titre est d'une profondeur sublime: le "ou" n'est pas un choix entre W et le souvenir d'enfance, une alternative entre l'un ou l'autre, mais plutôt une équivalence. La société W, misérable dans sa similitude avec la vie concentrationnaire, est le souvenir d'enfance de Perec. Génial. J'attendrai une autre décennie et je relirai inévitablement ce livre superbement et ingénieusement écrit.
La partie autobiographique m'a toutefois beaucoup plus impressionnée à la seconde lecture. La construction de la mémoire par l'écriture, problème classique de l'autobiographie ressassée depuis Saint-Simon prend ici des allures différentes. La mémoire fait constamment défaut. Le narrateur cherche dans les artéfacts de sa jeunesse, vieilles photos ou lieux revisités dans les années 70, le souvenir de son enfance. Les deux correspondent rarement: les photos lui montrent des événements dont il ne se rappelle pas, les amis retrouvés lui racontent un souvenir qui appartient en réalité à un camarade d'école, et d'autres souvenir lui reviennent, inventés de toute pièce d'après des bouts de littérature empruntés à Hugo ou Mallot, à Roussel ou Queneau. Le texte est pétri de conditionnel et de "ou", qui marquent un doute profond dans l'histoire personnelle et fragmentaire de Perec.
Le projet d'écriture:
"Je ne retrouverai jamais dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture, le scandale de leur silence et de mon silence : je n’écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire. J’écris : j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps ; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l’écriture : leur souvenir est mort à l’écriture : l’écriture et le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie."
L'écriture est participative, elle permet de prendre part à la Grande Histoire, si imposante qu'elle en a oblitéré la petite histoire de Perec. Et le titre est d'une profondeur sublime: le "ou" n'est pas un choix entre W et le souvenir d'enfance, une alternative entre l'un ou l'autre, mais plutôt une équivalence. La société W, misérable dans sa similitude avec la vie concentrationnaire, est le souvenir d'enfance de Perec. Génial. J'attendrai une autre décennie et je relirai inévitablement ce livre superbement et ingénieusement écrit.
May 12, 2013
Pour E... Pour eux....
« Je ne retrouverai jamais, dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente et l’écriture, le scandale de leur silence et de mon silence : je n’écria spas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire… »
W ou le souvenir d’enfance est un livre composé de fragments, des fragments de souvenirs perdus dans un passé trouble et palpable à la fois, où Perec s’approprie des actes dont il a été parfois le témoin, il erre dans un brouillard en se raccrochant à des objets concrets, des preuves tangibles comme des photos, avec des dates parfois inscrites au dos. Et à partir de ces photos, il tisse "les fils rompus de l’enfance", des réminiscences en ces temps de guerre. Perec livre ici le code capable de déchiffrer son œuvre, capable de déchiffrer l’écrivain, l’être humain qu’il est, marqué par la guerre qui a façonné sa vie par la mort. Et en s’armant de l’imaginaire, il livre l’un des livres les plus bouleversants sur l’Holocauste et sur "l'Histoire avec sa grande hache". Et lorsque les récits se "croisent", le choc est aussi brutal que silencieux, comme une lame s’enfonçant dans la poitrine. Et on est triste, profondément triste. Mais aussi heureux qu’un tel homme ait existé, et existe encore.
« …J’écris : j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi deux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que leur trace en est l’écriture : leur souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie. »
« Je ne retrouverai jamais, dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente et l’écriture, le scandale de leur silence et de mon silence : je n’écria spas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire… »
W ou le souvenir d’enfance est un livre composé de fragments, des fragments de souvenirs perdus dans un passé trouble et palpable à la fois, où Perec s’approprie des actes dont il a été parfois le témoin, il erre dans un brouillard en se raccrochant à des objets concrets, des preuves tangibles comme des photos, avec des dates parfois inscrites au dos. Et à partir de ces photos, il tisse "les fils rompus de l’enfance", des réminiscences en ces temps de guerre. Perec livre ici le code capable de déchiffrer son œuvre, capable de déchiffrer l’écrivain, l’être humain qu’il est, marqué par la guerre qui a façonné sa vie par la mort. Et en s’armant de l’imaginaire, il livre l’un des livres les plus bouleversants sur l’Holocauste et sur "l'Histoire avec sa grande hache". Et lorsque les récits se "croisent", le choc est aussi brutal que silencieux, comme une lame s’enfonçant dans la poitrine. Et on est triste, profondément triste. Mais aussi heureux qu’un tel homme ait existé, et existe encore.
« …J’écris : j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi deux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que leur trace en est l’écriture : leur souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie. »
May 9, 2022
A unique, original short novel with two story threads. One thread is the author’s autobiography of his early years. He begins by writing that he has no childhood memories up to the age of 12. His father died when he was 4 and his mother died when he was 6. He spent the war years in various boarding houses and his father’s sister adopted him in 1945. His childhood autobiography consists of the author trying to make sense of the little he can recall, the short term friends, available photographs from the period, his education and the books he read.
The second story thread is an account of a community on an island off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, where the society is based on the rules of sport and is focussed on classical ‘Olympic’ games, where villagers compete with one another. This thread describes in detail the rules of sport. An unreal world like concentration camps. There is no comment of food production and commerce.
This book was first published in France in 1975.
The second story thread is an account of a community on an island off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, where the society is based on the rules of sport and is focussed on classical ‘Olympic’ games, where villagers compete with one another. This thread describes in detail the rules of sport. An unreal world like concentration camps. There is no comment of food production and commerce.
This book was first published in France in 1975.
February 10, 2013
Fair warning, this review is going to be mostly quotations and a couple of personal meanderings.
“When I was thirteen I made up a story which I told and drew in pictures. Later I forgot it. Seven years ago, one evening, in Venice I suddenly remembered that this story was Called W and that it was, in a way, if not the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood….W is no more like my Olympic fantasy than that Olympic fantasy was like my childhood. But in the crisscross web they weave as in my reading of them I know there is to be found the inscription and the description of the path I have taken, the passage of my history and the story of my passage” (6-7).
And so the chapters alternate between Perec’s sparse and admittedly very imprecise memories of his childhood and a recounting of his fictional story of the land of W, a land completely consumed by sport. (Note that the W chapters are always in italics—only mentioned to delineate the many quotations I’ll be using).
For those looking for any type of biography about Perec, beware. After reading this, I’m even more anxiously awaiting the arrival of this biography. Perec’s memories are sporadic, woefully incomplete, and often a blend of memory, fantasy, and faux-memory. That’s not to say they aren’t worth reading, as a few are quite poignant. I know when reviewing other biographies, I’ve mused over the nature of truth in the authors’ recollections—some may be deliberately skewed, others may be attempts at brutal honesty, but all are ultimately subject to one’s own perception of self and, perhaps more importantly, to the whims of Mnemosyne. Try remembering back as far as possible. How vivid are your memories? Are you sure they are accurate? Are you sure they are even your own and not things that you’ve seen/heard and subconsciously appropriated as your own? At best, I’m sure they are little more than snapshots—a moment here, an event there. Oddly enough, for me at least, these snippets are often of the mundane rather than what I would ironically call the memorable. Well, this is what we get from Perec, and because of his unabashed admissions that he is anything but certain of his own recollections, this may be one of the most real biographies. However, what may make other biographies more interesting is the narrative fabric that makes them into, well, stories. Perec makes clear that this is no story, that he doesn’t even think he has anything to say:
“I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing…I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life” (42).
Thus, Perec intertwines a completely fictitious story, but, fittingly, even that has origins in his memories of his own childhood. At first, this story seems like it might promise a certain amount of intrigue and adventure. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes nothing more than a catalogue of how a society governed by sports and competition functions. For me, this part of the book didn’t get somewhat interesting again until I started to read it as a metaphor for life rather than just an amusing description of life on this ridiculous island.
Children in W live a carefree, idyllic life until they turn fourteen, at which point they enter the adult world. After leaving the unfettered freedom of childhood on W, “you soon grasp that one, and perhaps the main, feature of the world that is your world from now on is that its institutions are harsh and inflexible to an extent matched only by the vast scope of the rule-bending that goes on in them….The Law is implacable, but the Law is unpredictable. The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known. Between those who live under its sway and those who pronounce it stands an insurmountable barrier. The Athlete must know that nothing is certain; he must expect anything, the best outcome or the worst. Decisions concerning him, whether they be trivial or vital, are taken without reference to him; he has no control over them…. You have to know that chance is also one of the rules” (117-118 italics in original).
The first six months of this life are hyperbolically awful, as the novices are literally manacled. Through their eyes, the reader begins to see that this world, which at first seemed droll, is filled with misery and brutality. “How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it’s not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it’s not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That’s what there is, and that’s all” (139-140 italics in original).
W is no utopia, and life for the Athletes is like life for individuals anywhere:
“A W Athlete has scarcely any control over his life….The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious, striving, pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest” (159 italics in original).
Finally, the last chapter points out how this metaphor actually serves for something far more disturbing and far more explicit than a broad concept of Life. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on that early in my reading, especially when told that the two stories “were somehow double, with precise but ambiguous designs which seemed to be open to several different interpretations, without it being possible to decide on a satisfactory choice” (8 italics in original).
“When I was thirteen I made up a story which I told and drew in pictures. Later I forgot it. Seven years ago, one evening, in Venice I suddenly remembered that this story was Called W and that it was, in a way, if not the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood….W is no more like my Olympic fantasy than that Olympic fantasy was like my childhood. But in the crisscross web they weave as in my reading of them I know there is to be found the inscription and the description of the path I have taken, the passage of my history and the story of my passage” (6-7).
And so the chapters alternate between Perec’s sparse and admittedly very imprecise memories of his childhood and a recounting of his fictional story of the land of W, a land completely consumed by sport. (Note that the W chapters are always in italics—only mentioned to delineate the many quotations I’ll be using).
For those looking for any type of biography about Perec, beware. After reading this, I’m even more anxiously awaiting the arrival of this biography. Perec’s memories are sporadic, woefully incomplete, and often a blend of memory, fantasy, and faux-memory. That’s not to say they aren’t worth reading, as a few are quite poignant. I know when reviewing other biographies, I’ve mused over the nature of truth in the authors’ recollections—some may be deliberately skewed, others may be attempts at brutal honesty, but all are ultimately subject to one’s own perception of self and, perhaps more importantly, to the whims of Mnemosyne. Try remembering back as far as possible. How vivid are your memories? Are you sure they are accurate? Are you sure they are even your own and not things that you’ve seen/heard and subconsciously appropriated as your own? At best, I’m sure they are little more than snapshots—a moment here, an event there. Oddly enough, for me at least, these snippets are often of the mundane rather than what I would ironically call the memorable. Well, this is what we get from Perec, and because of his unabashed admissions that he is anything but certain of his own recollections, this may be one of the most real biographies. However, what may make other biographies more interesting is the narrative fabric that makes them into, well, stories. Perec makes clear that this is no story, that he doesn’t even think he has anything to say:
“I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing…I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life” (42).
Thus, Perec intertwines a completely fictitious story, but, fittingly, even that has origins in his memories of his own childhood. At first, this story seems like it might promise a certain amount of intrigue and adventure. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes nothing more than a catalogue of how a society governed by sports and competition functions. For me, this part of the book didn’t get somewhat interesting again until I started to read it as a metaphor for life rather than just an amusing description of life on this ridiculous island.
Children in W live a carefree, idyllic life until they turn fourteen, at which point they enter the adult world. After leaving the unfettered freedom of childhood on W, “you soon grasp that one, and perhaps the main, feature of the world that is your world from now on is that its institutions are harsh and inflexible to an extent matched only by the vast scope of the rule-bending that goes on in them….The Law is implacable, but the Law is unpredictable. The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known. Between those who live under its sway and those who pronounce it stands an insurmountable barrier. The Athlete must know that nothing is certain; he must expect anything, the best outcome or the worst. Decisions concerning him, whether they be trivial or vital, are taken without reference to him; he has no control over them…. You have to know that chance is also one of the rules” (117-118 italics in original).
The first six months of this life are hyperbolically awful, as the novices are literally manacled. Through their eyes, the reader begins to see that this world, which at first seemed droll, is filled with misery and brutality. “How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it’s not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it’s not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That’s what there is, and that’s all” (139-140 italics in original).
W is no utopia, and life for the Athletes is like life for individuals anywhere:
“A W Athlete has scarcely any control over his life….The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious, striving, pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest” (159 italics in original).
Finally, the last chapter points out how this metaphor actually serves for something far more disturbing and far more explicit than a broad concept of Life. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on that early in my reading, especially when told that the two stories “were somehow double, with precise but ambiguous designs which seemed to be open to several different interpretations, without it being possible to decide on a satisfactory choice” (8 italics in original).
October 4, 2022
Aslında tam olarak bir şey beklediğimden değildi ama yine de çıtanın altında kaldı. Anlatısını fazlasıyla yüzeysel buldum, bir şeyler ya da çoğu şey geçiştirilmiş gibi ne bileyim. Şimdi gidip 800 sayfa savaş temalı kitap okumak zorundayım, hevesin kursağında kalması kötü bir histir kurtulmak gerekir. 💅🏻
December 19, 2018
W toplumu bugün ve gelecekte de başımızın belası.
Read
April 21, 2022I didn’t get this. A “gutpunch”, as one reader would have it? Hell, maybe all that core-conditioning in karate is paying off, cos my guts were unscathed. Me, I found this dry, vapid, very tenuous. The link between the two strands I found slight, the link between the first and second halves of the second strand (ie, the Land-of-W part) non-existent, the whole thing half-baked though not a bad (if risky) idea in theory. Oh, and I thought the analogy (olympics to concentration camp) was a stretch. The thing that can’t be spoken? Maybe I’m too literal-minded, but I’ll take Borowski’s version any day: that is some kind of gutpunch. But then, as I say, I just didn’t get this. Perec, clearly, is some kind of a genius, along with his mentor Queneau (whom I also don’t get). No sarcasm here, it’s just that apparently my temperament doesn’t sit right with theirs. I’ve only read one short Perec piece besides this one (a novella, Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?, which I didn’t much like either), and some fragments of the User’s Manual, so chances are I haven’t cracked his emotional code yet. But will I ever? The fussiness on display in what I’ve read so far suggests otherwise, but never say never.
October 18, 2012
A strange book. In fact one of those books which is so strange that you long to sit down with the author to understand exactly what was going through his mind when he decided to pair a story of his childhood with a gruesome account of sports mad dystopia. Was he highlighting the horror of Nazi ideology? Underlining the unreliability of memories by contrasting his recollections with a completely absurd story? It is a testament to Perec that whatever path of strangeness he decided to frolic down it never strikes you as forced or over intellectualized rather I was left demanding more.
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