23%OFF
Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
W or The Memory of Childhood
Georges Perec
€ 13.99
€ 10.81
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for W or The Memory of Childhood
Paperback. Tells two parallel tales, in two parts - one is a story created in childhood and about childhood; and the other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. Num Pages: 176 pages. BIC Classification: FC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 200 x 130 x 12. Weight in Grams: 132.
Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself.
Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.
Product Details
Publisher
Vintage United Kingdom
Number of pages
176
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2011
Condition
New
Number of Pages
176
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780099552352
SKU
V9780099552352
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-99
About Georges Perec
Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.
Reviews for W or The Memory of Childhood
Perec was a haunted writer, haunted by his Jewish ancestry, by the Holocaust that coincided with his own orphaned childhood, by the death of his father in 1940 and his mother's disappearance in Auschwitz. Writing, for him, was an act of exorcism
Sunday Times
A strange and complicated book, a work of tremendous, silenced emotion
Observer
His brilliant and profound memoir-fantasy deserves to be recognised for what it is: a masterpiece
Guardian
The childhood story of 'W' carries Perec's confused conception of the concentration camps...bewilderingly sad
Independent
Perec was a polymathic genius, and his early death in 1982 (he was only 45) robbed France of its most dazzling experimental writer, one who tried everything and failed at nothing...He has, deservedly, become a cult in France, particularly with young Parisians, who instinctively (and rightly) identify him as the super-zapper, the biographer of their fragmented consumer culture, of which he was himself the creation.
Glasgow Herald
Sunday Times
A strange and complicated book, a work of tremendous, silenced emotion
Observer
His brilliant and profound memoir-fantasy deserves to be recognised for what it is: a masterpiece
Guardian
The childhood story of 'W' carries Perec's confused conception of the concentration camps...bewilderingly sad
Independent
Perec was a polymathic genius, and his early death in 1982 (he was only 45) robbed France of its most dazzling experimental writer, one who tried everything and failed at nothing...He has, deservedly, become a cult in France, particularly with young Parisians, who instinctively (and rightly) identify him as the super-zapper, the biographer of their fragmented consumer culture, of which he was himself the creation.
Glasgow Herald