Perec slams together two seeming disparate plots with tremendous effect, sending shockwaves of lucidity back over everything the reader has just read. The first plot consists of descriptions of Perec’s childhood before, during, and after WWII. The other plot is the search for, and a description of, an imaginary place he calls W.
In the first section of the book, the two plots seem very distinct. Perec’s recounting of memories from his childhood does not seem to relate to Gaspard Winckler’s search for a lost boy. However, even from this beginning, there is a dim connection in the reader’s mind: Perec searching for his lost boyhood is similar to Winckler searching for a lost boy.
Throughout the second section, the two plots are approaching ever closer. Perec continues recounting his youth during the war while describing a culture centered around Olympic-type games in the imaginary place of W. The torment the athletes are put through seems the natural culmination of a place dedicated to competition between adults, continuously seeking the Olympic ideal, yet growing corrupt and vicious after years of glorifying the games. And there are hints of things to come: the athletes make dice out of squashed cubes of bread; Jews in concentration camps make chess pieces out of bread.
Late in the book, Perec describes the fortress on the island of W where the government resides. The basement is full of gold teeth, rings, spectacles, and other objects such as remained from people imprisoned in concentration camps. The evidence that W is connected to the real world is growing stronger. In the final chapter, Perec recounts treatment of concentration camp prisoners drawing obvious comparisons to the way athletes were treated in W.
The reader sees the awful truth that W is not just a child’s perception of the adult world, it’s a real place where people treat other people horribly, and everyone, the government and individual people, accept and even celebrate the treatment. Additionally, it might have been the natural end of the Nazi culture if it had not been stopped, culminating in abuses and tortures tacitly accepted by a bureaucracy corrupted and a population debased, treating each other the way they had treated Jews in concentration camps.
In this exerpt, Perec describes the pain youth go through in W learning to accept the cruelties of their culture:
“How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else….You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There’s no resource, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There’s not even any hope that time will sort things out.”At first, this section seems to hint at Perec’s own pain in growing up and discovering the kind of world we live in; once Perec brings the plots together, however, it turns into deepest irony. The pain he describes isn’t just imaginary pain on the island of W, it is real pain: the pain of emerging out of childhood into a brutal world, the pain of living as an adult in a senseless, cruel world. It’s the pain that is both the realization and the memory that no god stepped in to stop the Holocaust.
As the reality of the treatment of Jews during the holocaust is contrasted with the treatment of Athletes on the island of W, the reader is stunned and the plot is invigorated with a horror and sadness that permeates back over all that has just been described. Perec ends with a statement that the location where he placed the imaginary place of W was, in reality, used as a displacement camp for Chile’s Fascist president Pinochet. As reality and imagination come crashing together again and again at the end of the book, the reader is simply held in shocked awe and left with a profound sense of the weighted terror of this world.
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