Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance

Our Reading Journey

In the spring of 2024, we navigated the fragile intersection of two seemingly unrelated texts that form Georges Perec’s 1975 masterpiece. On one side, we followed a meticulous adventure novel set on “W,” an island governed by a terrifying Olympic ideal where sport has mutated into a fascist dystopia. On the other, we pieced together Perec’s own broken autobiography—a fragmentary account of a Jewish child during Second World War France, composed of scattered snippets, absences, and meager anecdotes. Our discussion focused on the connection between the island's grandiose fantasy and the trauma of a childhood marked by erased memories, including the death of his mother in the camps.

The intellectual highlight of our session was analyzing the points of suspension where these two narratives collide. We debated Perec’s famous opening claim—“I have no childhood memories”—analyzing it not as a literal fact, but as a psychological state. We realized that the Olympic island metaphor reveals the athletic utopia as a chilling allegory for concentration camps, illustrating how a child's imagination processes horror as a game. Our conversation moved into the phenomenology of the gap, where the adult narrator attempts to console the traumatized child by honoring both the invented fable and the impossible story. We concluded that the meaning of the book lies not in the words themselves, but in the silence between the alternating chapters—a powerful testament to how writing can cling to the broken threads of a life. A heartbreaking masterpiece of trauma literature.

About the Author

Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a titan of the Oulipo movement and one of the most inventive writers of the 20th century. Obsessed with constraints, puzzles, and the infra-ordinary, his work—including the lipogrammatic novel La Disparition (written entirely without the letter 'e')—is a lifelong investigation into loss and absence. In W ou le souvenir d'enfance, he moved away from pure linguistic play to confront his own history, cementing his status as a writer who could transform the most clinical structural experiments into the most moving human documents.