W, Or, The Memory of Childhood
W, Or, The Memory of Childhood is a book written by Georges Perec. The book was published in 2003 and is listed under the Fiction category. For readers who want to quickly understand what this title offers, this page gives a clear overview of the book, including its description, author information, page count, ratings, and ISBN details.
The full title of the book is W, Or, The Memory of Childhood. When available, the subtitle is , which gives extra context about the theme, focus, or main idea behind the book. According to the available description, 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 … Ãwith¨ 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, stealing encouraged, rape common, 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 all of this happen, not on W, but before millions of spectators, some horrified, some cheering, some in-different, but all present at the games watching the events of that grisly arena?
This book has 176 pages, making it useful for readers who want to know the approximate length before starting. It has an average rating of 3.88, based on 1395 ratings, which can help readers understand how other people have responded to it.
For cataloging and reference purposes, the ISBN-13 is 9781567921588, while the ISBN-10 is 1567921582. These numbers are helpful when searching for the exact edition of the book online, in libraries, or in bookstores.
The book cover image can be viewed here: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=vuN10GmOHD0C&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api.
Overall, W, Or, The Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec is a title that may interest readers looking for books in Fiction. Whether you are researching new books, comparing editions, or building a reading list, this page gives you the most important details in one place.
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