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 meagre anecdotes. Our discussion centered on how these two threads are inextricably intertwined; the grandiose, suspect fantasy of the island exists precisely to fill the void left by a childhood where memories were erased by trauma and 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 focused on the metaphor of the Olympic island, realizing that the athletic utopia is actually a chilling allegory for the concentration camps, proving that the child’s imagination can only process horror through the lens of 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.