Like brilliant writers, she was truly surprised to get an award for her short story: “Celle qu’on ne voit pas”. Then two years ago, she decided to participate, just for fun, in the detective short story competition of Toulouse Detective Novel Festival. She started writing in her teens, uncertainly and discreetly, just to see. She also writes for the local culture weekly La Strada and for the Internet Retronews. Consequently, she decided to come back to her native place with her children and the man of her life. After several decades in Paris, she realized she was missing the sun, the sea and her family. She started her career as a journalist in the paper press then she specialized in writing for the web and eventually became a web-master. She attended hypokhâgne at Nice Lycée Masséna and with her gang went to Paris to attend khâgne. Nice-born, Michèle has kept the look of the teenager she used to be and has found her feet. Yet, this one, more than being a thriller, takes you into the streets of our beautiful town, and if you are Nice-born it makes childhood memories come back to you as well as teenage ones forgotten but so sweet…Let’s immerse ourselves in Michèle’s world where culture, humour and humility guide her. by David Bellos (Boston: David R.A new detective novel has just been published, one more in the literary forest you may think, and right you are. Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood trans.Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: Denöel, 1975).The title W is a pun on 'double vé/vie', referring to the two lives and two stories narrated in the text. Like much of Perec's work, W is characterized by word play. The final autobiographical chapter links back to the fictional narrative by a quotation from David Rousset about the Nazi death camps, where Perec's mother died: by now the reader has discovered that the story of the island is an allegory of life in the camps. While at first it seems a Utopia, successive chapters gradually reveal the arbitrary and cruel rules that govern the lives of the athletes. Life in W, seemingly modeled on the Olympic ideal, revolves around sport and competition. In the second part, the fictional narrative (apparently based on a story written by Perec at the age of thirteen) recounts the founding and organisation of a remote island country called W, said to be situated near Tierra del Fuego. The boy is also called Gaspard Winkler-the adult narrator of the story discovers that he took on the boy's identity after deserting the army, although at that time he believed he had been given forged identity papers.

In the first part, the fictional narrator is contacted by a mysterious individual, who informs him of the disappearance of a deaf and dumb boy in a shipwreck. The adult narrator sometimes provides interpretations of the childhood memories, and often comments on details of the memories which his research showed to be false or borrowed. The second part recollects his life as an evacuee. The memories in the first part of the book lead up to Perec's separation from his mother when he was evacuated in the Second World War.

The autobiographical thread is a collection of uncertain memories, as well as descriptions of photos which preserve moments from Perec's childhood.

Perec's novel consists of alternating chapters of autobiography and of a fictional story, divided into two parts. W, or the Memory of Childhood ( French: W ou le souvenir d'enfance) is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction by Georges Perec, published in 1975. 1988 The Harvill Press (English Translation)

French novella childhood nostalgia