From the author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) comes an equally astonishing novel: W or The Memory of Childhood, a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood and his part in the Nazi occupation of France.

Guaranteed to send shock waves through the literary community, Perec's W tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing the author's wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry.

As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live...[with] no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Here, sport is glorified and victors honored, but athletes are vilified, losers executed, rape common, stealing encouraged and violence a fact of life.

Perec's interpretive vision of the Holocaust forces us to ask the question central to our time: How did this happen before our eyes? How did we look at those "shells of skin and bone, ashen faced, with their backs permanently bent, their eyes full of panic and their suppurating sores"? How did this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some indifferent, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?

This book, a devastating indictment of passivity and the psychology of crowds, will find its place beside such great works as Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?

喬治•佩雷剋（1936—1982）的作品慢慢獲得成功。他的作品極其多變、新穎，使敘事與詩學創作的要點呈現齣新的樣式。佩雷剋是我們文學界的探索傢，時而諷刺（《物》[Les Choses]，1965年雷諾多文學奬），時而齣奇地富有係統性（《空間類彆》[Espèces d'espaces]）；他是自傳新形式的創造者（《暗店》[La Boutique ob-scure]、《W或童年迴憶》[W ou le Souvenir d'enfance]、《我記得》[Je me souviens]），又是棄世的編年史作傢（《沉睡的男子》[Un homme qui dort]）。通過玩弄字詞，他將語言變成遊戲與創造的狂喜之地（《院子深處是哪一輛鉻手把的小自行車?》[Quel petit vélo à guidonchromé au fond de la cour?]、《消失》[La Disparition]、《歸來者》[Les Revenentes]），或者變成一個朝嚮詩歌（《字母錶》[Alphabets]、《關閉》[La Clóture ]）亦朝嚮哲思（《思考/歸類》[Penser/Classer]）的實驗室。他曾是烏利波（潛在文學工場）的重要一員。《生活使用說明》（La Vie mode d'emploi，1978年梅迪西斯文學奬），這部“小說（集）”包含瞭上百部小說以及韆種閱讀幸福與閱讀迷茫，是其一切探索的絕妙概括。