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Loading... W, or the Memory of Childhood (Verba Mundi) (Verba Mundi (Paperback)) (original 1975; edition 2010)by Georges Perec (Author)
Work InformationW, or The Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec (1975)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Not Perec's strongest in my opinion. I enjoy his style enough that I finished it, but the allegory was a little too heavy handed for me. Usually I find Perec light hearted and playful, which was not completely absent in W, but I felt like I was being asked to be a little too serious, too concerned. Ah well, I think I'll move on to his Exeter Text next. ( ) Not Perec's strongest in my opinion. I enjoy his style enough that I finished it, but the allegory was a little too heavy handed for me. Usually I find Perec light hearted and playful, which was not completely absent in W, but I felt like I was being asked to be a little too serious, too concerned. Ah well, I think I'll move on to his Exeter Text next. Perec explores his memories of childhood and his reaction to the loss of his parents, both Jewish immigrants from Poland, during World War II. His father died in 1940 from wounds he received fighting in the French army; his mother was deported by the Nazis in early 1944 and is presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Perec was evacuated from Paris to the Dauphiné by the Red Cross in 1942, where he attended a Catholic boarding school and later went to live with relatives. The book has two alternating and apparently independent narratives. The even-numbered chapters form a fairly conventional memoir narrative, in which Perec examines memories, photographs, and texts he has written about himself earlier and tries to resolve them with what he can learn from family members and others who were around at the time. In many cases he finds that his memories don't square with the facts: he has appropriated to himself interesting or significant events that actually happened to other people, or he has shifted things around in time. Meanwhile, the odd-numbered chapters, printed in italics, tell the (imaginary) story of a deserter from a French colonial war, now living in Germany under the false name Gaspard Winckler, who is asked to go to the island of W in Tierra del Fuego in search of the real Gaspard Winckler, missing after a shipwreck. As the narrator tells us more and more about W, we start to realise what a strange and disturbing place it is, in which the whole of life is centred around meaningless sporting competitions conducted under an arbitrary, changeable and undisclosed code of rules. Eventually we work out Georges Perec entrelaça duas histórias: uma é formada pelas suas memórias da infância durante a Segunda Guerra e suas pesquisas sobre o destino dos pais, a segunda, pela reescrita de uma história que ele escreveu aos 13 anos, sobre a ilha de W. Por um lado, vemos como Perec busca pelas poucas memórias dos pais, que morreram durante a guerra, ele no front e ela em Auschwitz. Ele tenta achar fotos, anotaçãoes manuscritas, tudo que permita descobrir um pouco mais sobre eles. Por outro, vemos a aparente utopia da ilha de W se revelar um regime totalitário, em uma ligação que só fica clara pela citação final. A cada livro que leio, mais gosto do autor. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesCollection L'imaginaire (293) Harvill (46) Privé-domein (173) Volk und Welt Spektrum (114) Has as a studyHas as a student's study guide
"Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego, governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry." "As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live ... [with] no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, stealing encouraged, rape common, and violence a fact of life." "Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those "shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores?" How did all of this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some in-different, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?"--BOOK JACKET. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)843.914Literature French French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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