Long Sunday

annihilation

Perec on Friday

The first in an occasional series, foreshadowed by "techniques of the reading body".

W or The Memory of Childhood. The "or" in the title is ambivalent. It straddles the conjunction's two meanings: both (either) repetition, as in "right or starboard"; and (or) difference, as in "right or left." For this is a book that likewise straddles two narratives, two stories that both repeat and differ. On the one hand, a fiction involving a deaf mute child, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego, whose name has been appropriated by an army deserter. On the other hand, a memoir of Perec's own life in the shadow of his parents' deaths, his father we are told in the forces as the Germans advanced on Paris, his mother in or on the way to Auschwitz.

techniques of the reading body

As befits a man who wrote one novel eschewing the letter "e," and another (slimmer) one that did without "a," "i," "o," and "u," Georges Perec thought a lot about the materiality of language: its physical incarnation as marks on a page, marks that could be arranged and rearranged to reveal orders other than the merely semantic. Perec loved palindromes, for instance. Famously, in 1969 he composed a palindrome over 5,000 letters long (that's 1240 words, in each direction). It begins "Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule." It ends "Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

So no wonder he should have much to say about how to arrange one's books, and about the "socio-physiology" of reading.