W, or the Memory of Childhood…

This book was quite tragic though undoubtedly beautifully written. It’s hard not to feel sadness when reading Perec recount the memories he has of his childhood and the hardships that come with being an orphan. I felt especially moved when, describing his mother, he wrote “The arbitrary, schematic image that I have of her suits me; her image fits and defines her for me almost perfectly.” He writes this right after speaking about how little he truly knows about her, how most of what he knows has been fabricated by his own mind. I thought this really summed up the sad feeling when one loses a parent too young; of not knowing and never going to know all the details and stories of their parent’s life. This lack of detailed knowledge on his mother paralleled his other recollections of his past, though for a different reason. He writes about the family’s names and how they had to switch them to protect themselves, and now he isn’t even certain which names, details, or stories are real and which were only fabricated to hide the fact that they were Jewish. I found this to be the arching theme in the tragedy of Perec’s life in memories: that he really had so few it was hard for him to even know where or who he came from. This got me thinking about the importance of memory in our lives. Perhaps our memories are more important to us than we often realize? Having clear stories of where ourselves and our families came from makes us feel more of a purpose or meaning or something. However, I’ve also read that our memory is quite fickle, and we often remember things and events in different ways than they actually occurred. But is the fact that we believe them to be true what makes us feel comfort in them? As is obvious in this book, not having clear memories allows one to create stories as they please, such as the alternate plot about an island off of Tierra del Fuego.

Something I struggled with while reading this book were the alternating plots between chapters. I’ve come across this style of writing before, and I find the difficult thing about it is that you tend to favour one of the stories over the other, then struggle to feel motivated to read the story that you are enjoying less. For me, I favoured the fabricated story over Perec’s real one. Did you have a preference? Or did you enjoy the alternating plots?