SOURCE: "Allegory and Autobiography: Georges Perec's Narrative Resistance to Nostalgia," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 23, No. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 201-10.

In the following review of W ou Le Souvenir d'Enfance, Smith focuses on the novel's allegorical structure. She suggests that Perec's intention is to show that the creation of a narrative is an attempt to give coherent meaning to the chaos of the past.

In the context of Georges Perec's postmodern œuvre, which consists of novels that demonstrate through playful manipulation the pliability of language and narrative as media of communication, his autobiographical W ou Le Souvenir d'Enfance poses problems. Because it purports to reconstruct factual events of the past, it appears to draw upon a referentiality that is undermined by Perec's other, hyper-fictional, works. The form of W ou Le Souvenir d'Enfance, nevertheless, signals its departure from the conventions of the autobiographical genre. Its juxtaposition of...