The French novelist Georges Perec was a playful and experimental writer who wrote in a wide range of literary forms, including autobiographical works of various kinds. W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975; translated as W or The Memory of Childhood, 1988) is the most directly autobiographical of his books, but it cannot be used as a straightforward source of facts about his life. However, W ou le souvenir de l'enfance does provide a fragmented narrative of the writer's early life, representing a childhood radically affected by the events of World War II and the Holocaust. "All of this autobiographical work," Perec wrote in his journal (quoted by biographer David Bellos), "was organized around a single memory which, for me, was profoundly obscured, deeply buried and, in a sense, denied." In W ou le souvenir de l'enfance Perec addresses, in oblique and yet intensely personal form, the reality and memory of...