Georges Perec, Lost and Found in the Void: The Memoirs of an Indirect Witness

Georges Perec’s autobiographical novel W or The Memory of Childhood revolves elliptically around the fact that Perec was an indirect witness to the central events of his life: the loss of his mother and the Holocaust that caused him to spend his youth under an assumed—to his mind, counterfeit—identity. Perec built an identity out of this void by assiduously dismantling the means of storytelling and communication, from the level of plot down to the sentence, word and letter, all as a means of connecting the reader to his point of view.