Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood , tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

"Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: 'I’ll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I’ll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk.' An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is – in the words of David Bellos, the 'faithful exegete' who brought it to light – 'connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create – but it’s not like anything else that he wrote.'"--