Book Review: "W or The Memory of Childhood" by Georges Perec

I have read a few books set in the time of the Holocaust, or about the Holocaust in some way and most of the time, I have found myself in tears. I mean, Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was one of my first encounters with people who actually lived and died through it when I was a lot younger than I am now. I was about thirteen when I became pretty obsessed with The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman and then went on to reading more of these books such as but not limited to: Night by Elie Weisel, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally and obviously, my mother's favourite book of all time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. Books about the experiences of the Holocaust never fail to amaze me.

A semi-autobiographical novel, W or The Memory of Childhood is a short but beautifully written account of a fairly odd character living in a turbulent historical period. The first section of the book deals with a shipwreck in which a boy is rescued, the boy is also deaf. Named Gaspard Winkler, the boy has apparently deserted the army and there is a question about whether his identity has been entirely forged or not. It is a strange way to start an autobiography, but the use of wordplay, atmosphere and personal, emotive language makes it all worthwhile.

I felt like the second part was supposed to be an extended metaphor for a dictatorship because of the way the story is told. We have a teenager who seeks out to be an Olympian and respects the Olympic Sports and their training regimes. Looking towards the Olympians as living in some form of utopia from the outside, he is excited and overwhelmed with the idea. But, when he gets on to the inside of it, he understands that there is much more to be undersood since there really is no utopia. The Olympic Regime is rigid and covered with rules on every aspect of life. It is nothing how he imagined. The turn from being on the outside to being on the inside could be an extended metaphor for the difference between utopia and dystopia in the real world. From the outside everything looks fine, but from the inside everything is falling apart.

The final section is about the Nazi Death Camps in which Georges Perec's own mother was murdered. This is the way we discover what the rest of the book is actually about through this third section in which we see what the Death Camps actually entailed and the allegory that is related to them throughout the course of the text. I was actually really surprised I did not figure this out earlier, and I think it is because it is so well hidden.

The clues are in the text: the loss of identity, the desertion of the army by people who didn't agree with the system, the shipwreck of a nation, the dystopia from the inside, the rules in the regime like a dictatorship, then we get to the Nazi Death Camps. This is truly a grand work of fiction compressed into little over on hundred pages.

To conclude, I think I will read this again purely to go through and pick up more of those clues on the allegorical nature of the first two volumes in relation to the last one. When I say I was surprised, I mean that I knew very little about this book before I read it. The only thing I knew is that there was something about the Holocaust in there. This has been an interesting journey.