W ou le souvenir d'enfance Reading Order

W ou le souvenir d'enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975) by Georges Perec is the most personal work of one of the twentieth century's most formally inventive writers, and one of the most unusual Holocaust memoirs in existence. The book alternates between two distinct narratives in separate typefaces: one is an autobiographical account of Perec's childhood — his mother deported to Auschwitz in 1943, his father dead before the war, his own wartime childhood with relatives in Villard-de-Lans — written in the imperfect, uncertain tones of a man reconstructing a past he barely remembers and that was always incompletely available to him; the other is a fictional narrative about a mysterious island called W, off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, where a society organised entirely around sport is slowly revealed to be a Nazi dystopia. The two narratives never directly meet, but they shadow each other: the Olympic island's systematic cruelty is the shape of the childhood trauma that the autobiography cannot fully recover; the childhood's holes and gaps are the negative spaces that the fiction fills with horror. W ou le souvenir d'enfance is Perec's most direct confrontation with the absence at the centre of his life — the parents who died before he could know them — and it is one of the most formally original Holocaust narratives: a book that says, by its very structure, that some memories cannot be directly recovered, only approached through fictions that carry their shape.