ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

More than an album of photographs, more than an iconographic summation, this book is a new-style critical essay of the life of a writer, his works and his genius. It is like a film of an intellectual adventure showing the many faces of the writer, his gestures, memories of words and places, long friendships, and pages of his novels, scenes of his film making. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

This novel contains two distinct alternating biographies: the first is an allegorical story of W, a bizarre, mythical island civilization, symbolizing the Holocaust. It is printed in italics. The second text is Perec's memories of his childhood in Paris. Perec writes in his introduction that the two stories "are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though neither could exist on its own, as though it was only their coming together, the distant light they cast on each other, that could make apparent what is never quite said in one,never quite said in the other, but said only in their fragile overlapping." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.