Two shapes, V and V, side-by-side. Two narratives; One attempting to retrieve childhood memories so vague, contradictory, and without substance that our ability to grasp them as a former reality becomes all but impossible and the other an imaginative tale that becomes so elaborate, precise, and terrifying that it replaces reality while we are reading it. Two lines = a cross, two triangles = the star of David, two crooks = a swastika, and two s = the Gestapo. Somehow, together, the narratives construct Perec's lived and imagined relationship to the war and holocaust that devastated his family even as he, a child, was only peripherally aware of it. Lovely, lovely book.