In this book, there are two simply alternating texts. It might almost seem as if they have nothing in common, yet they are inextricably intertwined, as if neither could exist on its own, and their meaning emerges only in their fragile intersection. One of these texts belongs entirely to the imaginary: it's an adventure novel, the arbitrary but meticulous reconstruction of a childhood fantasy evoking a city governed by the Olympic ideal. Behind this athletic utopia, however, lies a dark dystopia. The other text is an autobiography by Georges Perec himself: the fragmentary account of a child's life during the war, a tale of few exploits and memories, made up of scattered snippets, absences, omissions, doubts, hypotheses and meagre anecdotes. Adventure stories, by contrast, are grandiose, or perhaps suspect. For it begins by telling one story and then, all at once, launches into another: in this split, this break that suspends the narrative around who knows what expectation, lies the initial place from which this book emerged, these points of suspension to which the broken threads of childhood and the weft of writing have clung. Readers will easily understand that, behind the pure fiction and broken autobiography, a childlike imagination unfolds to fill the voids left by a broken childhood.

In this tangled work, published in 1975 and now a classic of twentieth-century French literature, Georges Perec (1936-1982) delivers one of the most beautiful and powerful metaphors of childhood. "I have no childhood memories", he writes, and, as if to fill the gap left by the history of the Second World War, the narrator/author delivers an imaginary tale born entirely from the mind of a child who finds in fiction a way out and a refuge from the absurdity of the world.