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A Void
Znikniecia
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Georges Perec
133books1,562followersGeorges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 439 reviews
April 23, 2022
If an author in his opus bans a typographical sign, which is most common and popular in so many nations, what will occur?
A Void will hold a galaxy in its grisly and vacuous sway.
A narration starts with apocalyptical visions� A narrator is flying high, soaring in indigo sky amongst clouds� I follow suit�
A Void is an absurdist whodunit noir, a potpourri of plots, a patchwork of fibs� It is a fascinating curio of a story: allusions, illusions, hallucinations, turmoil, tumult, agitation, chaos, confusion and so on�
Avoid a void in living� Avoid a void in books� Avoid a void in anything.
A Void will hold a galaxy in its grisly and vacuous sway.
A narration starts with apocalyptical visions� A narrator is flying high, soaring in indigo sky amongst clouds� I follow suit�
…this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations:
a body crumpling up, a hoodlum, a portrait of an artist as a young dog;
a bullock, a Bogartian falcon, a brooding blackbird;
an arthritic old man;
a sigh;
or a giant grampus, baiting Jonah, trapping Cain, haunting Ahab: all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of wisdom and authority which is now lost � now and, alas, for always � but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not abandon.
A Void is an absurdist whodunit noir, a potpourri of plots, a patchwork of fibs� It is a fascinating curio of a story: allusions, illusions, hallucinations, turmoil, tumult, agitation, chaos, confusion and so on�
“A Void!� shouts Augustus B. Clifford, dropping his crystal glass and spilling aquavit on his rug.
“A Void!� moans Olga, smashing a lamp in agitation.
“A Void!� roars Arthur Wilburg Savorgnan, swallowing half his cigar.
“A Void!� brays Squaw in a shrill and jangling whinny, atomizing a trio of matching mirrors.
“A Void, right, that’s what I said,� affirms Amaury: “it all turns on a Void.�
Avoid a void in living� Avoid a void in books� Avoid a void in anything.
September 25, 2014
God, this is hard. I'm just aiming for two to four paragraphs, and I'm stuck. I can hardly do a thing. And this guy has a solid book, with a plot and all. Smart, no doubt about it. But... what's this book's point? Naturally, you want to know that, and so do I. I think that I can say it in this way. You might lack an important thing, and not know it's missing. Your world looks okay, almost normal. But no, in fact it's not normal or okay at all, if you think a bit.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for ŷ policy reasons)
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for ŷ policy reasons)
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April 21, 2022
Holy lipogram, Batman!
A Void - French author Georges Perec's 400-page novel where a bunch of buddies search for their missing chum Anton Vowl, an adventure yarn parodying genres like crime noir and Gothic horror, all with a variety of spins on style and wordplay - verbal monkeyshines, linguistic antics, quizzical phonetic pranks, rhetorical roguery.
Will the steadfast searchers smoke out the missing symbol needed to conclude their search? Who knows? But to add a pinch of piquancy, such stealth might be hazardous, even life-threatening.
And, oh, yes - Georges Perec took up Raymond Queneau and Group Oulipo's challenge to experiment with constrained writing techniques, in this case, writing an entire novel without once using the letter E. I recall the shock on the face of the librarian at my local library when I told her about the verbal void in A Void.
As by way of example of what a reader is in store for, here's a short paragraph from the first section of the book:
"Vowl turns off his radio, sits down on a rug in his living room, starts inhaling lustily and trying to do push-ups, but is atrociously out of form and all too soon, his back curving, his chin jutting out, curls up in a ball, and, staring raptly at his Aubusson, succumbs to a fascination with a labyrinth of curious and transitory motifs that swim into his vision and vanish again."
I read A Vod some years ago and I just did revisit the novel. Same akimbo experience. After a page or two, I had the feeling my mind was listing at a 45 degree angle. Oh, yes, both times I had the distinct impression the E-less sentences were messing with my neurology - but in a good, creative way.
For me, such offbeat Oulipo oddness demands a sharp slant for sharing the flavor of Georges Perec's highly original work.
So, let's take a look at the first short paragraph of The Bathroom by the contemporary Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
1. When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it; no, I would pass some pleasant hours there, meditating in the bathtub, sometimes dressed, other times naked. Edmondsson, who liked to be there with me, said it made me calmer: occasionally I would even say something funny, we would laugh. I would wave my arms as I spoke, explaining that the most practical bathtubs were those with parallel sides, a sloping back, and a straight front, which relieves the user of the need for a footrest.
Here goes for my E-less Bathtub transposition:
1. Whilst I did start to put in my hours from noon to four p.m. in the bathtub I had no aim of moving into it; no, I would pass gratifying bits of day in the bathtub, ruminating, occasionally with shirt and pants, occasionally stark-ass. My gal, who would fancy joining in, said it would prompt my spirit into calm: occasionally I would blurt out funny stuff, gal and I would laugh, I would flap my arms as I took a stab at a bit of chat, clarifying that most practical bathtubs crop up with uniform points both ways, a sloping back, and a upright, straight front, which will allay the man or gal of a wish for a stool or ottoman.
I would strongly recommend you take a short paragraph from your favorite novel and try your hand at rewriting without once using the letter E. So doing, you'll have a deeper appreciation for what it must have been like for Georges Perec to write his novel, and, likewise, for Gilbert Adair to translate the French into English. Remarkable plus ten.
Up for a singular artistic whoop? A Void will work its tricky magic.
Did I really write the above two sentences without an E? Infectious.
French author Georges Perec, 1936-1982
January 31, 2024
'A Void' or 'Disappearance' is like no other book I have read and completely different from the other two novels by Perec I have read ('Things: A Story of the Sixties' and 'W, or the Memory of Childhood').
Formally, it is a detective story, but, in fact, it is a joke, a puzzle, a game, a funny (but sometimes chilling), confusing phantasmagoric mystification and, certainly, a linguistic experiment. However, on a deeper level, it is author's neverending quest for something indescribable and unattainable that could fill his own aching void left in him by the war and the loss of his parents.
It is incredible how far the determination to avoid just one vowel can take the author's imagination and creativity and what new opportunities it can open in front of him!
'But an illusion was always lurking in such solutions, an illusion of wisdom, wisdom to which not any of us could truly lay claim, not our protagonists, not our author, and not I, Swann, his faithful right hand, and it was that lack of wisdom, that chronic inability of ours to grasp what was actually going on, that had us talking away, constructing our story, building up its idiotic plot, inflating all its intrinsic bombast, its absurd hocuspocus, without at any instant attaining its cardinal point, its
horizon, its infinity, that climactic coda of harmony out of which a solution would at long last loom, but approaching, by an inch, by a micron, by an angstrom, that fatal point at which, without that taboo constituting us and uniting us and drawing us apart,
a void,
a void with its brass hands,
a void with its cold, numb hands,
a void rubbing out its own inscription,
a void assuring this Book, of all Books, a truly singular purity
and immaculation, notwithstanding all its markings in ink and paragraphs of print, a void brings our story to its conclusion."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'So, as I think, in this work, for all that its origin was chaotic, I finally did satisfy most of my goals and obligations. Not only did I spin out a fairly straightforward story but I had a lot of fun
with it (wasn't it Raymond Q. Knowall who said that it was hardly worth writing if it was simply as a soporific?), fun, principally (by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up), in my ambition of participating, of collaborating, in a common policy to adopt a radical, wilfully conflictual position vis-a-vis fiction, a position that, implicitly critical as it is of a Troyat, a Mauriac, a Blondin or a Cau, of any Quai Conti, Figaro or Prix Goncourt hack, might still chart a path along which fiction could again find an inspiration, a charm, a stimulus, in narrational virtuosity of a sort thought lost for good.'
('A Void' POSTSCRIPT)
Formally, it is a detective story, but, in fact, it is a joke, a puzzle, a game, a funny (but sometimes chilling), confusing phantasmagoric mystification and, certainly, a linguistic experiment. However, on a deeper level, it is author's neverending quest for something indescribable and unattainable that could fill his own aching void left in him by the war and the loss of his parents.
It is incredible how far the determination to avoid just one vowel can take the author's imagination and creativity and what new opportunities it can open in front of him!
'But an illusion was always lurking in such solutions, an illusion of wisdom, wisdom to which not any of us could truly lay claim, not our protagonists, not our author, and not I, Swann, his faithful right hand, and it was that lack of wisdom, that chronic inability of ours to grasp what was actually going on, that had us talking away, constructing our story, building up its idiotic plot, inflating all its intrinsic bombast, its absurd hocuspocus, without at any instant attaining its cardinal point, its
horizon, its infinity, that climactic coda of harmony out of which a solution would at long last loom, but approaching, by an inch, by a micron, by an angstrom, that fatal point at which, without that taboo constituting us and uniting us and drawing us apart,
a void,
a void with its brass hands,
a void with its cold, numb hands,
a void rubbing out its own inscription,
a void assuring this Book, of all Books, a truly singular purity
and immaculation, notwithstanding all its markings in ink and paragraphs of print, a void brings our story to its conclusion."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'So, as I think, in this work, for all that its origin was chaotic, I finally did satisfy most of my goals and obligations. Not only did I spin out a fairly straightforward story but I had a lot of fun
with it (wasn't it Raymond Q. Knowall who said that it was hardly worth writing if it was simply as a soporific?), fun, principally (by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up), in my ambition of participating, of collaborating, in a common policy to adopt a radical, wilfully conflictual position vis-a-vis fiction, a position that, implicitly critical as it is of a Troyat, a Mauriac, a Blondin or a Cau, of any Quai Conti, Figaro or Prix Goncourt hack, might still chart a path along which fiction could again find an inspiration, a charm, a stimulus, in narrational virtuosity of a sort thought lost for good.'
('A Void' POSTSCRIPT)
December 2, 2014
OH MY GOD.
No. Just no.
I am taking my own advice: life is too short.
yes; Perec and Adair are both very clever. And I actually enjoyed the introduction. I would have been happy to have left it there: a short, witty, intellectual exercise. But it's Johnson's dog!
I have abandoned the book, like a broken umbrella. It's in the magazine holder at Columbus Coffee next to Auckland Hospital. Have at it, fellow Aucklanders.
No. Just no.
I am taking my own advice: life is too short.
yes; Perec and Adair are both very clever. And I actually enjoyed the introduction. I would have been happy to have left it there: a short, witty, intellectual exercise. But it's Johnson's dog!
I have abandoned the book, like a broken umbrella. It's in the magazine holder at Columbus Coffee next to Auckland Hospital. Have at it, fellow Aucklanders.
August 28, 2022
KRITIK:
Against Constraint
Author and translator both warrant much approbation for this work of fiction...(1), (2)
...although you or I might ask why anybody would want to put up with such imaginary trials and tribulations,"as if totally bound by a rigid, cast-iron law".
You know what I'm trying to say: Why would an author not adopt a familiar, popular, or straightforward approach to writing, with which both of us could gladly and profitably comply?
"A Passion and a Gift"
This is no call for vanilla or stock standard artistry. If it affirms a "command of basics", if it displays "a passion and a gift", I know that "you too, my ghostly collaborator, hanging on my words, would wish it all to work out satisfactorily."
Why now submit to so unusual an Oulipian condition? Why construct a fiction in this fashion, its only product or upshot a trivial void or vanishing act? Was it truly, or just, "a spur to [his] imagination", as our author finally claims by way of postscript?
Within an Inch of Wit (1)
Why not abstain from this difficulty? Why foist such a rigorous constraint on his (or our) own writing or construction? Toward what goal? For what gain? Is it satisfying or a pain?
Is it just playing with words? (At which you can only groan?) A silly distraction of and by an author? Or just a frolic of his own?
Auto-Portrait of Arcimboldo by His Own Hand: A Portrait of Its Own Artist (3)
Through a Glass Onion, Darkly
Author, how can you sustain your own imagination (and ours) for as long as is obligatory for our mutual gratification? What if victory avoids your pathway? What if you don't find triumph on your road? What if both of us jointly fail? What if it was all in vain or to no avail?
What if it was monotonous, arid, dull? What if it was mind-numbingly boring? In contrast, what if "this circuitous labyrinth", this curious conundrum of a fiction, was not in fact humdrum or lacking fruit, but fascinating, bountiful, and humourous to boot?
Lots of Plot Twists and Russian Dolls
Although its own critics and narrators might proclaim this book "a thick, Gothic work of fiction with lots of plot twists and a Russian doll construction," that also contains many mystifying, almost Nabokovian machinations, it is still primarily a hook from which to hang and pay court to a lipogrammatic training drill:
"A Truly Singular Purity and Immaculation"
At worst, you could say that, as our author boasts, this fiction is "a truly singular purity and immaculation" that, in my lowly opinion, thwarts and foils maximalism. (4) I could stomach that. For lunch. At most. Four stars. (5)
ANNOTATIONS:
(1)
(2)
(3) This author of his own fiction: "What, on occasion, it [a void?] brings to mind is a painting by Arcimboldo, a portrait of its own artist..."
(4) Notwithstanding its many allusions to Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, and Ishmail too.
(5) This author of his own fiction: "...I had no inkling at all that, as an acorn contains an oak, anything solid would grow out of it."
SOUNDTRACK:
Against Constraint
Author and translator both warrant much approbation for this work of fiction...(1), (2)
...although you or I might ask why anybody would want to put up with such imaginary trials and tribulations,"as if totally bound by a rigid, cast-iron law".
You know what I'm trying to say: Why would an author not adopt a familiar, popular, or straightforward approach to writing, with which both of us could gladly and profitably comply?
"A Passion and a Gift"
This is no call for vanilla or stock standard artistry. If it affirms a "command of basics", if it displays "a passion and a gift", I know that "you too, my ghostly collaborator, hanging on my words, would wish it all to work out satisfactorily."
Why now submit to so unusual an Oulipian condition? Why construct a fiction in this fashion, its only product or upshot a trivial void or vanishing act? Was it truly, or just, "a spur to [his] imagination", as our author finally claims by way of postscript?
Within an Inch of Wit (1)
Why not abstain from this difficulty? Why foist such a rigorous constraint on his (or our) own writing or construction? Toward what goal? For what gain? Is it satisfying or a pain?
Is it just playing with words? (At which you can only groan?) A silly distraction of and by an author? Or just a frolic of his own?
Auto-Portrait of Arcimboldo by His Own Hand: A Portrait of Its Own Artist (3)
Through a Glass Onion, Darkly
Author, how can you sustain your own imagination (and ours) for as long as is obligatory for our mutual gratification? What if victory avoids your pathway? What if you don't find triumph on your road? What if both of us jointly fail? What if it was all in vain or to no avail?
What if it was monotonous, arid, dull? What if it was mind-numbingly boring? In contrast, what if "this circuitous labyrinth", this curious conundrum of a fiction, was not in fact humdrum or lacking fruit, but fascinating, bountiful, and humourous to boot?
Lots of Plot Twists and Russian Dolls
Although its own critics and narrators might proclaim this book "a thick, Gothic work of fiction with lots of plot twists and a Russian doll construction," that also contains many mystifying, almost Nabokovian machinations, it is still primarily a hook from which to hang and pay court to a lipogrammatic training drill:
"...a curious anomaly distinguishing it from outwardly similar narrations...still ignorant of that conundrum that sustains its propagation...a work in which an author's imagination runs so wild, in which his writing is so stylistically outlandish, his plotting so absurd, of an inspiration so capricious and inconstant, so gratuitous and instinctual, you'd think his brain was going soft." (Pardon my indulging in a long but singularly apt quotation from this author.)
"A Truly Singular Purity and Immaculation"
At worst, you could say that, as our author boasts, this fiction is "a truly singular purity and immaculation" that, in my lowly opinion, thwarts and foils maximalism. (4) I could stomach that. For lunch. At most. Four stars. (5)
ANNOTATIONS:
(1)
(2)
(3) This author of his own fiction: "What, on occasion, it [a void?] brings to mind is a painting by Arcimboldo, a portrait of its own artist..."
(4) Notwithstanding its many allusions to Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, and Ishmail too.
(5) This author of his own fiction: "...I had no inkling at all that, as an acorn contains an oak, anything solid would grow out of it."
SOUNDTRACK:
Want to read
January 2, 2014A girl I room with owns this book, and following our talk tonight about it at our local bar, I'm now looking into A Void. I doubt I'll go far in my try, but will admit to a strong curiosity, though his story might not turn out so amazing. No doubt this was a blast to craft, but, I hazard, not as much fun to look through, sort of similar to studying a crossword you didn't do.... Still, I'll sally forth boldly with a stab at it. Why not?
FYI, I'm now involuntarily thinking within the limits put down by this book, and I must say, doing so is good for a laugh, and I don't find it actually as hard as many might think. You should try! It's actually a lot of fun; okay, if not a lot, a substantial amount.... Anyway, I'll inform you all if this book is worth trying as soon as I find out, but writing in this form, I can say right now, is a good form of procrastination from my vacation packing.... which I should go do right now. My goal is arriving at that old Port Authority prior to noon today to catch my bus, so I should stop right now and go do that.
FYI, I'm now involuntarily thinking within the limits put down by this book, and I must say, doing so is good for a laugh, and I don't find it actually as hard as many might think. You should try! It's actually a lot of fun; okay, if not a lot, a substantial amount.... Anyway, I'll inform you all if this book is worth trying as soon as I find out, but writing in this form, I can say right now, is a good form of procrastination from my vacation packing.... which I should go do right now. My goal is arriving at that old Port Authority prior to noon today to catch my bus, so I should stop right now and go do that.
February 26, 2013
Okay. Let's all take a second to appreciate that this was both written and translated without a single instance of the letter "e." You have to respect that kind of lipogrammic dedication on both the author's and translator's parts (translating the puns to be relevant in another language deserves additional kudos). Its effect on the dialogue, narrative and story itself is a wonder to behold in its own right.
This is a hard one to review because most of what I want to say would divulge too many spoilers and I just can't ruin something this good. Y'all need to experience this wonder firsthand to appreciate how mind-bogglingly fantabulous it is. Cop out? Perhaps. Cheap ploy to encourage even one other person to read this? Hell. Yes.
The back-cover blurb calls this "a metaphysical whodunnit"; Wikipedia posits that its total absence of the fifth letter acts as "a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War"; the author states in his postscript that this novel and its constraint were borne of a haphazard bet; I say that it is proof of how my life had no real meaning before my introduction to Georges Perec. And possibly that this is the book Pynchon would have written if he were a crazy-haired French dude (seriously, stop and take a gander at GP's photo on his profile page -- this is exactly the kind of book one ought to expect from a bloke who looks like the very personification of mad genius). His trademark paranoia, obscure allusions and hysterical-antics-hiding-a-deep-melancholy are all but oozing from these pages of another man's work.
In the first 24 pages alone, references are made to (among other things) various operas, international political figures, Warner Bros. cartoons, James Joyce, biblical parables, Franz Kafka, Monty Python, Malcolm Lowry, Moby Dick, Gone with the Wind and Virginia Woolf (specifically Orlando); the rest of the book is just about as schizophrenic and far-reaching as the allusions and parallels it invokes in just its first two chapters.
At the heart of this, underscoring the madcap detective story, is an unfolding revenge plot that, like Moby Dick, is thoroughly Shakespearean in its unrelenting quest for so-called justice, and is driven by a deep understanding of the extent that both self-preservation and familial, friendly and romantic love can all impel individuals to the same degree of action (or in-), much like The Bard so masterfully demonstrated so many centuries before. The rendering of Willy Shakes's "To Be, Or Not to Be" speech as "Living, or Not Living" is as inspired as the novel to its very end, where those left standing even extend some closure to the audience as the curtains fall.
It's worth nothing that the body count is downright nihilistic but the detours necessary to sidestep any use of "e" (as well as Perec's adeptly applied sense of humor in detailing God-awful tragedies, which is apparent just halfway through the novel's preface) as if the second vowel were a strategically placed turd create such finely tuned hilarity that I couldn't help but laugh when I should have been nursing a punch in the gut. I like my humor like I like my coffee (i.e.: almost too black to be palatable), so witnessing gallows humor used to an awe-inspiring extent was an unexpected bonus appealing specifically to my dark and demented tastes. That's not to say that the truly sad moments aren't drenched in heartache, because they do try to rip the reader's heart out through the most painful means necessary.
Whether this is novel is brilliantly insane or insanely brilliant, the ride is an absolutely incredible one that is brimming with breakneck twists and meticulous construction, both in its language and its plot. And it's made me absolutely certain that, if all of Perec's stuff is as tight and compelling and beautiful as this, I need to stuff my head with all of his works I can find. You should consider doing the same.
This is a hard one to review because most of what I want to say would divulge too many spoilers and I just can't ruin something this good. Y'all need to experience this wonder firsthand to appreciate how mind-bogglingly fantabulous it is. Cop out? Perhaps. Cheap ploy to encourage even one other person to read this? Hell. Yes.
The back-cover blurb calls this "a metaphysical whodunnit"; Wikipedia posits that its total absence of the fifth letter acts as "a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War"; the author states in his postscript that this novel and its constraint were borne of a haphazard bet; I say that it is proof of how my life had no real meaning before my introduction to Georges Perec. And possibly that this is the book Pynchon would have written if he were a crazy-haired French dude (seriously, stop and take a gander at GP's photo on his profile page -- this is exactly the kind of book one ought to expect from a bloke who looks like the very personification of mad genius). His trademark paranoia, obscure allusions and hysterical-antics-hiding-a-deep-melancholy are all but oozing from these pages of another man's work.
In the first 24 pages alone, references are made to (among other things) various operas, international political figures, Warner Bros. cartoons, James Joyce, biblical parables, Franz Kafka, Monty Python, Malcolm Lowry, Moby Dick, Gone with the Wind and Virginia Woolf (specifically Orlando); the rest of the book is just about as schizophrenic and far-reaching as the allusions and parallels it invokes in just its first two chapters.
At the heart of this, underscoring the madcap detective story, is an unfolding revenge plot that, like Moby Dick, is thoroughly Shakespearean in its unrelenting quest for so-called justice, and is driven by a deep understanding of the extent that both self-preservation and familial, friendly and romantic love can all impel individuals to the same degree of action (or in-), much like The Bard so masterfully demonstrated so many centuries before. The rendering of Willy Shakes's "To Be, Or Not to Be" speech as "Living, or Not Living" is as inspired as the novel to its very end, where those left standing even extend some closure to the audience as the curtains fall.
It's worth nothing that the body count is downright nihilistic but the detours necessary to sidestep any use of "e" (as well as Perec's adeptly applied sense of humor in detailing God-awful tragedies, which is apparent just halfway through the novel's preface) as if the second vowel were a strategically placed turd create such finely tuned hilarity that I couldn't help but laugh when I should have been nursing a punch in the gut. I like my humor like I like my coffee (i.e.: almost too black to be palatable), so witnessing gallows humor used to an awe-inspiring extent was an unexpected bonus appealing specifically to my dark and demented tastes. That's not to say that the truly sad moments aren't drenched in heartache, because they do try to rip the reader's heart out through the most painful means necessary.
Whether this is novel is brilliantly insane or insanely brilliant, the ride is an absolutely incredible one that is brimming with breakneck twists and meticulous construction, both in its language and its plot. And it's made me absolutely certain that, if all of Perec's stuff is as tight and compelling and beautiful as this, I need to stuff my head with all of his works I can find. You should consider doing the same.
December 2, 2022
“Kayboluş� yazılma sistemiyle tanınan ve hep böyle anılan bir roman: özelliği “e� harfi kullanılmadan yazılmış olması. G. Perec de bundan şikayetçiymiş, kitabın kendisi hakkında hiç konuşulmaması bu katmanlı kitaba haksızlık olarak değerlendirirmiş. Roman klasik bir polisiye-dedektiflik romanı havasını veriyor. Ana karakter Anton Ssliharf (orjinalinde Anton Voyl) arkasında bir mektup bırakarak ansızın ortadan kaybolur. Arkadaşları onu aramaya başlarlar. Mizah ön planda, Oulipo’nun hünerleri sadece bir lipogram değil bu romanda, bir espri etrafında onlarca sürpriz yaratılmıştır. Perec kitabı kurgularken sevdiği kitap veya yazarları da yerleştirmiş romana, örneğin Moby Dick, Oedipus, Baudelaire, Mallarme, V. Hugo, Rimbaud, E. A. Poe, T. Mann ilk aklıma gelenler. Romanın adına uygun düşen kayboluşa dair başka metinlere göndermeler vardır. Örneğin, “Moby Dick� romanının özeti lipogramatik bir şekilde 9. bölümünde verilmiştir.
“Kayboluş”un yazar için anlamı büyük bir kelime olduğuna kitapla ilgili okumalarda rastladım, şöyle ki; anne ve babasını savaşlarda yitirmiş, annesinden geriye kalan sadece bir “kayıp belgesi�, Yahudi dilini (Yiddiş) kaybetmiş, hatta adını bile isteyerek kaybetmiş, çünkü Fransızca’da ya ilk “e� üzerinde aksan işareti ile ya da “Perrec� olarak yazılması gerektiğini belirtiyorlar. Yani bu “e� harfinin kayboluşu da sembolik. Fransız alfabenin 5. harfi “e�, Fransızca orjinalinde kaybolmuş, Türkçe cevirisinde de “e� 6. harf olduğundan bu bölüm kaybolmuş. 26 bölümlük orjinaline karşı Türçe çeviri 29 bölümlü. Çok zekice; çünkü Fransız alfabesi 26, Türk alfabesi 29 harf, aradaki farkı çevirmen Cemal Yardımcı kendisi için kullanmış, iyi de yapmış, kitabı daha bir anlaşılır kılmış. Denilebilr ki o zaman çeviri orijinali değiştirmiş ! Sezar’ın hakkı Sezar’a, orjinal Fransızca dışında aynı sistemle “e� harfi kullanmadan ancak Türkçe dahil şimdiye kadar 11 dile çevrilmeye cesaret edilmiş. Best-seller veya ödüllü kitapların 30-40 dile çevrildiğini düşünürsek çevirici Cemal Yardımcı’ya o bölümleri helal etmemek haksızlık olur.
Kitap için düşüncelerim karışık, mizah unsuru dikkat çekici olsa da latince sözler, şiirler, müzikle ilgili göndermeler çok zorlayıcı. Buna bir de çeviride Türkçe’ye uyarlama için yapılan isim ve yer değişiklikleri, atasözleri vb eklenince metinden çok sık kopmalar, uzaklaşmalar yaşadım. Aslında klasik bir roman gibi anlatamam ne konusunu, ne sonunu, çünkü dedim ya metin karışık ve zor. Bu spekülatif eseri okuduğum için memnunum, iyi bir roman okuduğum için memnun muyum? Bilemedim vallahi. Beğeni notum 3, Perec sevgimden 4 verdim.
Not: bu yorumu okumak yararlı olur
/review/show...
“Kayboluş”un yazar için anlamı büyük bir kelime olduğuna kitapla ilgili okumalarda rastladım, şöyle ki; anne ve babasını savaşlarda yitirmiş, annesinden geriye kalan sadece bir “kayıp belgesi�, Yahudi dilini (Yiddiş) kaybetmiş, hatta adını bile isteyerek kaybetmiş, çünkü Fransızca’da ya ilk “e� üzerinde aksan işareti ile ya da “Perrec� olarak yazılması gerektiğini belirtiyorlar. Yani bu “e� harfinin kayboluşu da sembolik. Fransız alfabenin 5. harfi “e�, Fransızca orjinalinde kaybolmuş, Türkçe cevirisinde de “e� 6. harf olduğundan bu bölüm kaybolmuş. 26 bölümlük orjinaline karşı Türçe çeviri 29 bölümlü. Çok zekice; çünkü Fransız alfabesi 26, Türk alfabesi 29 harf, aradaki farkı çevirmen Cemal Yardımcı kendisi için kullanmış, iyi de yapmış, kitabı daha bir anlaşılır kılmış. Denilebilr ki o zaman çeviri orijinali değiştirmiş ! Sezar’ın hakkı Sezar’a, orjinal Fransızca dışında aynı sistemle “e� harfi kullanmadan ancak Türkçe dahil şimdiye kadar 11 dile çevrilmeye cesaret edilmiş. Best-seller veya ödüllü kitapların 30-40 dile çevrildiğini düşünürsek çevirici Cemal Yardımcı’ya o bölümleri helal etmemek haksızlık olur.
Kitap için düşüncelerim karışık, mizah unsuru dikkat çekici olsa da latince sözler, şiirler, müzikle ilgili göndermeler çok zorlayıcı. Buna bir de çeviride Türkçe’ye uyarlama için yapılan isim ve yer değişiklikleri, atasözleri vb eklenince metinden çok sık kopmalar, uzaklaşmalar yaşadım. Aslında klasik bir roman gibi anlatamam ne konusunu, ne sonunu, çünkü dedim ya metin karışık ve zor. Bu spekülatif eseri okuduğum için memnunum, iyi bir roman okuduğum için memnun muyum? Bilemedim vallahi. Beğeni notum 3, Perec sevgimden 4 verdim.
Not: bu yorumu okumak yararlı olur
/review/show...
January 8, 2025
“Tonio Vocel no concilió el sueño. Encendió el fluorescente. Miró el reloj: cinco y quince. Suspiró hondo. Respiró en el lecho, se reclinó sobre el cojín. Cogió un libro, lo hojeó y lo leyó; pero sólo pudo ver un lío enorme; los términos confusos le impidieron seguir el hilo.�
A es lo omitido en todo el texto de este libro y es el único momento en que lo escribiré en este pequeño resumen.
Un libro muy difícil de leer es este, solo producto de genio eterno que conocimos como Georges Perec y que por momentos se tornó duro pero no por ello imposible.
Eso sí: "El secuestro" solo puede ser escrito en tiempo pretérito. En otro puede ser un enredo sin retorno. Y un posible embrollo es incluir el género femenino. Como vemos, este estupendo escritor Perec diseñó todo el meollo con ciertos ingredientes: decisión, solidez, mucho esmero.
Fue un hueso duro de roer este libro que en muchos episodios se tornó denso como el novelón Ulises escrito por ese dios único dios, don Joyce (yo lo recuerdo y suspiro por dentro...), cómo no. Requirió mucho esfuerzo en León Gieco componer “Los Orozco" (todo con o), ¡ni qué decir escribir un volumen completo con el mismo método!
Todo se constituye de un puzle surgido del supuesto secuestro del conocido (y querido jurisperito cuyo nombre es Tonio Vocel). Qué misterio se cierne sobre este pobre hombre que por cierto designio del destino es sujeto de eso, un secuestro muy siniestro sin posibles indicios de resolución.
Un horrible suceso en el que no se ve luz el otro extremo del túnel. Qué terrible, qué tremendo, qué peligroso, qué triste...
Seguro que provocó estertor en el cerebro y fuego en los ojos de Perec escribirlo, porque el reto es enorme.
Me quedo muy feliz porque pude leerlo desde el inicio y concluirlo con el íntimo orgullo de sentirme dichoso y pleno de leer el último renglón previo cierre del libro.
Mis respetos, señor Perec, pues yo lo defino señor como un genio enorme. Lo que usted logró en este libro (y en el texto que contiene), es digno de ser definido como un libro único y precioso.
Debo decirlo con convicción: tienen que leer "El secuestro".
A es lo omitido en todo el texto de este libro y es el único momento en que lo escribiré en este pequeño resumen.
Un libro muy difícil de leer es este, solo producto de genio eterno que conocimos como Georges Perec y que por momentos se tornó duro pero no por ello imposible.
Eso sí: "El secuestro" solo puede ser escrito en tiempo pretérito. En otro puede ser un enredo sin retorno. Y un posible embrollo es incluir el género femenino. Como vemos, este estupendo escritor Perec diseñó todo el meollo con ciertos ingredientes: decisión, solidez, mucho esmero.
Fue un hueso duro de roer este libro que en muchos episodios se tornó denso como el novelón Ulises escrito por ese dios único dios, don Joyce (yo lo recuerdo y suspiro por dentro...), cómo no. Requirió mucho esfuerzo en León Gieco componer “Los Orozco" (todo con o), ¡ni qué decir escribir un volumen completo con el mismo método!
Todo se constituye de un puzle surgido del supuesto secuestro del conocido (y querido jurisperito cuyo nombre es Tonio Vocel). Qué misterio se cierne sobre este pobre hombre que por cierto designio del destino es sujeto de eso, un secuestro muy siniestro sin posibles indicios de resolución.
Un horrible suceso en el que no se ve luz el otro extremo del túnel. Qué terrible, qué tremendo, qué peligroso, qué triste...
Seguro que provocó estertor en el cerebro y fuego en los ojos de Perec escribirlo, porque el reto es enorme.
Me quedo muy feliz porque pude leerlo desde el inicio y concluirlo con el íntimo orgullo de sentirme dichoso y pleno de leer el último renglón previo cierre del libro.
Mis respetos, señor Perec, pues yo lo defino señor como un genio enorme. Lo que usted logró en este libro (y en el texto que contiene), es digno de ser definido como un libro único y precioso.
Debo decirlo con convicción: tienen que leer "El secuestro".
April 3, 2019
Happy 50th anniversary, La disparition!!
What It’s About: A Short Account
Anton Voyl is ill. Insomnia and illusions assail him. Doctors, pills, visits to hospitals bring no avail. At night, Anton scrawls drafts of fictional accounts, such as a story of Aignan killing a sphinx and fucking(3), all unknowingly, his mama(3). Days and nights pass thus, all bringing only pain. His body shrinks, until, finally, oblivion claims him.
His pal(3), Amaury Conson, looks for him. His only hint is Anton’s last puzzling mail with this post-scriptum, his last words, “This brown fox jumps quickly across a vizir’s dog.�* Dog and fox? His thoughts turn to Paris’s zoo.
At this zoo, four pals(3) of Anton cross paths: Olga Mavrokordatos, Ottavio Ottaviani, Hassan Ibn Abbou, and said Amaury. That location containing no solutions, it is off to Ascott(4). But its racing hounds too bring no satisfaction.
Back to Paris and an assassin kills Hassan. At his burial, his body is not found in its coffin. As with Anton’s, it too is now lost.
Confusions multiplying, it is off to Olga’s villa by train. On that train is Arthur Wilburg Savorgnan, a buddy too of Anton’s. Augustus B. Clifford, Olga’s dad(3)-in-law owns that villa, inhabiting it with Olga and a maid, “Squaw�. Olga’s husband, Douglas Haig Clifford, is not now living, dying long ago in a fatal fall. His story, from adoption, infancy, adulthood, right to its sad conclusion is told by Augustus.
Looking for solutions by scouring Anton’s books, a commonality is found: all talk of a blank, a void, a missing thing. Two days pass in this way, until, a crisis hits. Morbidity(2) visits Augustus and Olga. It’s panic all round. Aid is sought and at night, two additional pals, Aloysius Swann and Ottavio Ottaviani, turn up bringing information.
Anton’s story, his past, is told to all. It is a story too of Olga, Hassan, Ottaviani, and Douglas: until now only pals but actually Anton’s long lost siblings. Sharing a Turkish clan’s DNA(6), this group bound by blood, fall victim to its Maldiction(7): a law that insists on sibling killing sibling, papa killing child. It’s clan lawfair(7) of an I for an I(7).
Clan kids(3) all carry its birthmark, its conginatal(7) brand: a round with a small gap and a straight dash inwards. Hid by dad, Arthur, in a distribution by adoption, it’s unc(3), dad’s bro(3), that’s hunting and killing his kin, fulfilling his clan duty and his own villanous wish.
Plots turn on plots, and in a dramatic conclusion, a culprit finally unmasks to claim victory.
Review
When I first heard of Perec’s novel, La Disparition, I was intrigued. A novel without the letter “e�, the most common letter in French. How did he do it? Well, now I know, and he has some pretty nifty and some pretty nasty tricks.
The novel is a tour de force of skill in vocabulary and grammatical manipulation. The chief difficulties are:
� He can only use la or � (“the�) but not le; un but not une (“a� or “an�).
� He can’t use elle or elles (“she�, “they�), but can use il, ils, or on (“he�, “they�, “one�). That explains the lack of female characters in the novel.
� He can’t use ce, cet, or cette (“this� and “that�).
� He has to be careful to avoid adjectives with feminine nouns as these demand an “e� suffix.
� He can use son or sa but not ses (“his�, “her�, “their�).
What helps a great deal is that he can use the French passé simple, a particular form of past tense used in written fictional works. This mean he can avoid the use of the passé composé which demands the use of the “é� in the same way as English requires the use of the “ed� in its past tense. The conjugation of the passé simple does not use the “e� at all.
All in, these restrictions still leave him a lot of room for manoeuvre. I think it's more difficult in English as you lose a lot of the basic parts of sentence building: "the", "he", "she", "they", "their", "we", "them", and most of the past participles
Some pretty neat tricks that he uses:
(1) A clever workaround that Perec uses when he is forced to use the article le is to interpose an adjective beginning with a vowel between the article and the noun. That allows him to change the le to �.
(2) He relies on some very obscure and old words as replacements: e.g., choir instead of tomber (“f�), ouir instead of édzܳٱ (“lٱ�), nonnain instead of nonne (“nܲ�).
(3) He uses slang words as replacements: e.g. nana instead of femme (“wڱ�).
(4) He uses proper nouns as replacements: e.g. He’ll write something like, “He stayed at a Ritz or a Hilton� instead of “He stayed at a hotel.�
The less savoury tricks are:
(5) He’ll use foreign words as replacements, often inappropriately. His characters say “thank you� as he can’t use meç. Sometimes, they break into Latin. The more egregious examples include having a character suddenly say in English, “It was a girl, not a boy,� and not, ��était une fille et pas un garçon.�
(6) He uses common acronyms of terms that contain the letter “e� e.g.. PDG (président directeur genérale).
(7) He uses neologisms and wordplay: e.g., Maldiction and not Malédiction (justified by the play on diction and mal meaning bad diction and “malediction� meaning curse); conginatal and not congénital; la choisification (completely made up word) instead of le choix (“cǾ�).
(8) He’ll just break the grammar and spelling rules: e.g. ’oisir instead of le loisir (“leisure�) @ p261; ’u岹Գ instead of me suicidant (“killing myself�) @p277.
Impressive it might be, and if you search the internet you'll find many other structural gimmicks he used (like the novel being broken up into 26 chapters. Geddit!!) However, the story is pretty daft and I really felt cheated by the less savoury tricks he uses. I started keeping track towards the end and it was about one every two pages or so. Ultimately, it's like playing the piano with your feet or with one finger missing: impressive as a parlour trick but still just a parlour trick.
* Note: The actual phrase in the novel is Portons dix bons whiskys à l'avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo (“Bring ten good whiskeys to the boorish advocate who was smoking at the zoo�). As with the text used in the summary, it uses all the letters of the alphabet except the “e�.
What It’s About: A Short Account
Anton Voyl is ill. Insomnia and illusions assail him. Doctors, pills, visits to hospitals bring no avail. At night, Anton scrawls drafts of fictional accounts, such as a story of Aignan killing a sphinx and fucking(3), all unknowingly, his mama(3). Days and nights pass thus, all bringing only pain. His body shrinks, until, finally, oblivion claims him.
His pal(3), Amaury Conson, looks for him. His only hint is Anton’s last puzzling mail with this post-scriptum, his last words, “This brown fox jumps quickly across a vizir’s dog.�* Dog and fox? His thoughts turn to Paris’s zoo.
At this zoo, four pals(3) of Anton cross paths: Olga Mavrokordatos, Ottavio Ottaviani, Hassan Ibn Abbou, and said Amaury. That location containing no solutions, it is off to Ascott(4). But its racing hounds too bring no satisfaction.
Back to Paris and an assassin kills Hassan. At his burial, his body is not found in its coffin. As with Anton’s, it too is now lost.
Confusions multiplying, it is off to Olga’s villa by train. On that train is Arthur Wilburg Savorgnan, a buddy too of Anton’s. Augustus B. Clifford, Olga’s dad(3)-in-law owns that villa, inhabiting it with Olga and a maid, “Squaw�. Olga’s husband, Douglas Haig Clifford, is not now living, dying long ago in a fatal fall. His story, from adoption, infancy, adulthood, right to its sad conclusion is told by Augustus.
Looking for solutions by scouring Anton’s books, a commonality is found: all talk of a blank, a void, a missing thing. Two days pass in this way, until, a crisis hits. Morbidity(2) visits Augustus and Olga. It’s panic all round. Aid is sought and at night, two additional pals, Aloysius Swann and Ottavio Ottaviani, turn up bringing information.
Anton’s story, his past, is told to all. It is a story too of Olga, Hassan, Ottaviani, and Douglas: until now only pals but actually Anton’s long lost siblings. Sharing a Turkish clan’s DNA(6), this group bound by blood, fall victim to its Maldiction(7): a law that insists on sibling killing sibling, papa killing child. It’s clan lawfair(7) of an I for an I(7).
Clan kids(3) all carry its birthmark, its conginatal(7) brand: a round with a small gap and a straight dash inwards. Hid by dad, Arthur, in a distribution by adoption, it’s unc(3), dad’s bro(3), that’s hunting and killing his kin, fulfilling his clan duty and his own villanous wish.
Plots turn on plots, and in a dramatic conclusion, a culprit finally unmasks to claim victory.
Review
When I first heard of Perec’s novel, La Disparition, I was intrigued. A novel without the letter “e�, the most common letter in French. How did he do it? Well, now I know, and he has some pretty nifty and some pretty nasty tricks.
The novel is a tour de force of skill in vocabulary and grammatical manipulation. The chief difficulties are:
� He can only use la or � (“the�) but not le; un but not une (“a� or “an�).
� He can’t use elle or elles (“she�, “they�), but can use il, ils, or on (“he�, “they�, “one�). That explains the lack of female characters in the novel.
� He can’t use ce, cet, or cette (“this� and “that�).
� He has to be careful to avoid adjectives with feminine nouns as these demand an “e� suffix.
� He can use son or sa but not ses (“his�, “her�, “their�).
What helps a great deal is that he can use the French passé simple, a particular form of past tense used in written fictional works. This mean he can avoid the use of the passé composé which demands the use of the “é� in the same way as English requires the use of the “ed� in its past tense. The conjugation of the passé simple does not use the “e� at all.
All in, these restrictions still leave him a lot of room for manoeuvre. I think it's more difficult in English as you lose a lot of the basic parts of sentence building: "the", "he", "she", "they", "their", "we", "them", and most of the past participles
Some pretty neat tricks that he uses:
(1) A clever workaround that Perec uses when he is forced to use the article le is to interpose an adjective beginning with a vowel between the article and the noun. That allows him to change the le to �.
(2) He relies on some very obscure and old words as replacements: e.g., choir instead of tomber (“f�), ouir instead of édzܳٱ (“lٱ�), nonnain instead of nonne (“nܲ�).
(3) He uses slang words as replacements: e.g. nana instead of femme (“wڱ�).
(4) He uses proper nouns as replacements: e.g. He’ll write something like, “He stayed at a Ritz or a Hilton� instead of “He stayed at a hotel.�
The less savoury tricks are:
(5) He’ll use foreign words as replacements, often inappropriately. His characters say “thank you� as he can’t use meç. Sometimes, they break into Latin. The more egregious examples include having a character suddenly say in English, “It was a girl, not a boy,� and not, ��était une fille et pas un garçon.�
(6) He uses common acronyms of terms that contain the letter “e� e.g.. PDG (président directeur genérale).
(7) He uses neologisms and wordplay: e.g., Maldiction and not Malédiction (justified by the play on diction and mal meaning bad diction and “malediction� meaning curse); conginatal and not congénital; la choisification (completely made up word) instead of le choix (“cǾ�).
(8) He’ll just break the grammar and spelling rules: e.g. ’oisir instead of le loisir (“leisure�) @ p261; ’u岹Գ instead of me suicidant (“killing myself�) @p277.
Impressive it might be, and if you search the internet you'll find many other structural gimmicks he used (like the novel being broken up into 26 chapters. Geddit!!) However, the story is pretty daft and I really felt cheated by the less savoury tricks he uses. I started keeping track towards the end and it was about one every two pages or so. Ultimately, it's like playing the piano with your feet or with one finger missing: impressive as a parlour trick but still just a parlour trick.
* Note: The actual phrase in the novel is Portons dix bons whiskys à l'avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo (“Bring ten good whiskeys to the boorish advocate who was smoking at the zoo�). As with the text used in the summary, it uses all the letters of the alphabet except the “e�.
March 26, 2010
So impressive, the lack of coherence or interest is irrelvant. Honestly. Try writing a sentence without an E. Go on. See? Five stars.
February 10, 2016
Zeka ve dıygunun birleştiği okuduğum en iyi edebiyat oyunlarından biri.
Read
December 17, 2014Occasionally one finds succinct answers to the rather conservation [sic -- obv. we mean ‘conservative’] objections that all this POMO is just self-indulgent game=playing with language, (etc). And, yes, we can blame DFW for earning this lazy accusation so much cred. I really don't want to rehearse all the various variations these kinds of things take on. You know, like with Husserl, that :: The work is the thing. Nevertheless, one might always provide one of those gottcha moments which you always believe would put the matter to rest. (And to head off another one, the request to Please just stop with the dualisms should be addressed to the conservative critik ; the ‘innovative/experimentalists� aren’t the dualists here, they are the correct ones). Frankly, the first exhibit which should put to rest the accusation that all this POMO is just playing games with language (technical term here should be “noodling�) is the work of Raymond Federman. That he is BURIED really is an indictment of a certain (conservative/reactionary) manner of conceiving reality/etc.
And just so you know that what I am about to quote, what I am about to reveal, what you are about to witness which will probably not change your opinion about literature one iota, is not from a neutral source. The thing comes from the pen of Tom McCarthy whom for some reason I had thought of as a student of John Barth. Whether he is one or not, he may as well be. Barth is a POMO author=exhibit who is pretty conventionally middle-class and doesn’t really have anything at stake except for the overwhelming literary question, How does one write fiction after Joyce/etc? And Barth has essay’d over this question. To the degree to which his essays are kind of required reading for this kind of question.
All this about a book I haven’t read by an author I’ve never read.
And I’m not even trying to omit the ‘e�. I’ll just say that both my parents are very much alive. My grandparents, with the exception of my paternal g-pa, lived to rather rich old ages, given their dirt=farming lives.
Perec. Prc, in a poor transliteration from/to the Hebrew. פרץ says my googlator (I’m too embarrassed to claim that I’ve spent even the time learning the aleph-bet ; it’s all been roundly forgotten, my chagrin). Is it significant that Hebrew ‘leaves out� all vowels? And it’s not really a problem? Even if you try it with English?
The digression here is either that I like to hear myself type or I’m embarrassed to offer you yet again the same thing you’ve heard over and over again. And every time this kind of thing comes up you (I? I’ve lost the pronomial order again!) (where’s the English equivalent for the German “man� ; “one� just doesn’t work today on the street) say something about how people just don’t want to read xyz kind of thing. They want to read Dan Brown and that’s okay because what a person wants is what a person wants and there’s nothing one (!, I mean “you� of course (or “I�?)) can say. The digressing here is mostly a function of the absence of my really having anything heavy to say. Whereas usually the digression is a function of avoiding having precisely a very heavy thing to digress around. Federman calls his absence The Unforgivable Enormity.
The quotation, I really should inform you, is from Tom McCarthy in a recently published article in London Review of Books, “Writing Machines: Tom McCarthy on realism and the real�. You should read the whole thing. Here’s the link ::
So that’s really all I have to say. Mostly to apologize once more for my logorrhea (words through kidneys, straight from the heart!) but mostly just to apologize (speaking upon my words?) for ramming once again down your throat this apparent (merely apparent, because my side knows that the only way to approach ‘realism� in fiction is to innovate and experiment (yes, we know the ‘meaning� of those words is contended, and those who are id’d as “experimental� also like to object to “labels� etc)) dualistic antagonism -- but it’s just that I feel it unnecessarily urgent that once again I want to declare that I prefer to take the word of exciting and dazzlingly new Writers over the word of conservative boring readers. Okay, there’s another relation of Two ; is it dualistic? Dunno, but it is unnecessary. Not all readers are conservative and boring, and a hell of a lot of writers are not exciting or dazzling. Some are confounding and I like them too.
And just so you know that what I am about to quote, what I am about to reveal, what you are about to witness which will probably not change your opinion about literature one iota, is not from a neutral source. The thing comes from the pen of Tom McCarthy whom for some reason I had thought of as a student of John Barth. Whether he is one or not, he may as well be. Barth is a POMO author=exhibit who is pretty conventionally middle-class and doesn’t really have anything at stake except for the overwhelming literary question, How does one write fiction after Joyce/etc? And Barth has essay’d over this question. To the degree to which his essays are kind of required reading for this kind of question.
All this about a book I haven’t read by an author I’ve never read.
And I’m not even trying to omit the ‘e�. I’ll just say that both my parents are very much alive. My grandparents, with the exception of my paternal g-pa, lived to rather rich old ages, given their dirt=farming lives.
Perec. Prc, in a poor transliteration from/to the Hebrew. פרץ says my googlator (I’m too embarrassed to claim that I’ve spent even the time learning the aleph-bet ; it’s all been roundly forgotten, my chagrin). Is it significant that Hebrew ‘leaves out� all vowels? And it’s not really a problem? Even if you try it with English?
The digression here is either that I like to hear myself type or I’m embarrassed to offer you yet again the same thing you’ve heard over and over again. And every time this kind of thing comes up you (I? I’ve lost the pronomial order again!) (where’s the English equivalent for the German “man� ; “one� just doesn’t work today on the street) say something about how people just don’t want to read xyz kind of thing. They want to read Dan Brown and that’s okay because what a person wants is what a person wants and there’s nothing one (!, I mean “you� of course (or “I�?)) can say. The digressing here is mostly a function of the absence of my really having anything heavy to say. Whereas usually the digression is a function of avoiding having precisely a very heavy thing to digress around. Federman calls his absence The Unforgivable Enormity.
But sometimes the real is more than just hidden: sometimes its significance lies in its absence. Perec’s La Disparition famously contains no letter e � not only the letter most used in French (as in English) prose, but also the core of the words è and è. Both of Perec’s parents having fallen victim to the Nazis (father in battle, mother in Auschwitz), several critics have heard in the French e its homophone eux, ‘them�. The real that lurks beneath the playfulness thus becomes, in this instance, both personal and historical, the joker-card a marker for the 20th century’s least funny moment. The same real � the Holocaust in particular � impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi.In other words, this POMO experimental playing language games which Perec does in A Void may have the same kind of heavy duty absence significance as does Federman’s unceasing digressions. That’s the quotation I’ve been dancing around, unsuccessfully avoiding the thing I came here today to share with you. And it’s been bothering me too recently, without really trying to delve into holocaust fiction and the many questions which surround it. In a rather straight forward fictional manner Paul Verhaeghen in his novel Omega Minor rather directly raises some significant objections to the conventional realism established by such as the institutions of the Primo Levi’s and the Elie Wiese’s about how holocaust fiction ought to be written. The result naturally is the BURIAL of the likes of Federman. I ask you, Why has Federman’s truth been avoided?
The quotation, I really should inform you, is from Tom McCarthy in a recently published article in London Review of Books, “Writing Machines: Tom McCarthy on realism and the real�. You should read the whole thing. Here’s the link ::
So that’s really all I have to say. Mostly to apologize once more for my logorrhea (words through kidneys, straight from the heart!) but mostly just to apologize (speaking upon my words?) for ramming once again down your throat this apparent (merely apparent, because my side knows that the only way to approach ‘realism� in fiction is to innovate and experiment (yes, we know the ‘meaning� of those words is contended, and those who are id’d as “experimental� also like to object to “labels� etc)) dualistic antagonism -- but it’s just that I feel it unnecessarily urgent that once again I want to declare that I prefer to take the word of exciting and dazzlingly new Writers over the word of conservative boring readers. Okay, there’s another relation of Two ; is it dualistic? Dunno, but it is unnecessary. Not all readers are conservative and boring, and a hell of a lot of writers are not exciting or dazzling. Some are confounding and I like them too.
May 16, 2017
My shelves speak for themselves. Although I've had words in the past about proofreading, it has never made me start a dedicated shelf. But this is war.
SACK THE PROOFREADER. Fancy being handed a ms. that contains no letter 'e' and not noticing. Incroyabl.
Furthermore, why wasn't it written by Gorgs Prc. Or by somebody else altogether? Probably Hungarian?
SACK THE PROOFREADER. Fancy being handed a ms. that contains no letter 'e' and not noticing. Incroyabl.
Furthermore, why wasn't it written by Gorgs Prc. Or by somebody else altogether? Probably Hungarian?
Read
November 24, 2024What Happens to Style in Oulipo?
In the popular reception, Perec's book is considered as a linguistic marvel. But that's just praising virtuosity: as an accomplishment, Gilbert Adair’s A Void (1995), one of the English translations of La Disparition (1969), is exemplary, but what is it as a reading experience? Critics treat it, in effect, as a book of conceptual poetry, like Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget (2000, nearly contemporaneous with the English translation), a transcription of his movements that does not ask to be read from first page to last.
Perec himself helpfully gives reasons for his experiment in the final chapter. As far as I know this hasn’t received a close reading. I won’t try that here, except to say that ]Perec wanted the book to be a “stimulant... [for] fiction-writing today� and a “wilfully conflictual� provocation “vis-à-vis fiction.� For an ideal reader, then, this book might be a model indicating the kind of radical strategies that have to be adopted to make the novel a viable form. That formulation is consistent with the primary purpose of Oulipo, to provide models for literature. But it is also a full-length novel, unlike so many of Oulipo’s proposals and formulations.
In the years since A Void (1995), the , and the , a large scholarly literature has appeared on this and other books that operate by the rule of the lipogram. Much of it focuses either on Perec’s elision of his own earlier life and the holocaust, or on the social context of Oulipo and Perec's practice. (For example Warren Motte. "Pereckonings," in Yale French Studies, 2004; a good review is Heather Mawhinney, "Vol du Bourdon," Modern Language Review 97, 2002). These academic approaches are similar to the online and newspaper reviews in that they tend to focus on meanings that emerge from the book as a whole rather than the reader's page-by-page puzzlement.
The difficulty, for me, is in squaring Perec's and others' interest in the abstract challenge of omitting the letter "e" with the experience of reading, which is anything but generalized. In order for the book to operate as Perec seems to have hoped, the avoidance of the letter "e" has to be seen as putting variable but continuous pressure on ordinary narration: the void has to have an abstract effect, turning the reader's thoughts to questions of what comprises expected forms of narration and what happens when they are diverted. The book can then become a provocation aimed at "fiction" in general, not by virtue of its single idea and strategy, but by way of its many individual departured from expected conventions of narration and description. Likewise, in order for the book to operate as an instance of the void evoked in W, the avoidance of the letter "e" has to be of interest mainly for its continuous troubling absence.
In the critical reception, there is no place for what is normally called "style" or "voice": they are taken to be deliciously mangled by the omission of "e"s. This is true especially in post-Oulipean conceptual writing. (See Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito's "End of Oulipo?," reviewed by Mitchell Kerley in SubStance 47, 2018.)
Yet I think it needs to be said that what happens in reading is quite different from what's implied by the book's critical reception or by the injunction not to read for expression, style, or voice. The overall narrative is cleverly arranged so that the persistent and almost always unnoticed absence of the letter "e" from the lives of the characters is what produces their deaths. But at the level of sentences, phrases, and word choices, the void is often more annoying and repetitive than enabling. Here is an example, using Adair's English translation. The issue here is not how faithful the translation is, or how clever the original choice in French, but what expressive effect Adair’s choices have on reading.)
"Miraculously, though, Albin got out of Tirana by night and, hiding out in a thick, dark, almost fairy-story wood, would languish in it for all of six springs and six autumns, a half-moribund survivor...' (p. 159)
The phrase, "half-moribund survivor," is apparently a substitute for "half-dead." The book is replete with examples of complex, Latinate words substituting for simpler, Anglo-Saxon ones. The result tends to be quirky archaism and unexpected formality.
(In Perec’s original it’s of course different:
“Albin, donc, put fuit, gagnant un profond maquis où, huit ans durant, il stagna, survivant, mi-moribond…� (p. 177).
Perec could have chosen “moribond,� but he may have had in mind “� demi-mort.� The odd word, “mi-moribond,� isn’t archaic—to me it sounds whimsical, the sort of thing a dedicated lipogrammatist might invent.)
There are many passages in Adair’s translation that sound archaic, formal, stiff or outdated. It's different with "all of six springs and six autumns." The book is also full of versions of that phrase � "20 springs," "six springs," and so on. All those are presumably to avoid the word "years." Now that's not a problem in French, where it’s just “huit ans,� but it is typical of Adair’s translation. “Six springs and six autumms� sounds Biblical to me, and also like a children’s narrative.
It's different again with "fairy-story wood," which sounds like a substitute for "fairy-tale forest." It’s neither archaic nor Biblical. If it has an expressive value, it's just the fleeting annoyance I feel at guessing why Adair chose it.
(Of course my guess would be wrong, because Adair invented the fairy-tale part: but my concern here is how the English reads, not its fidelity. In French, as always, it’s different: “maquis� is “thicket,� “scrubland,� or just “bush,� and in context presumably “wasteland� or even “wildnerness.� It might conjure thoughts of the French resistance, hiding in the scrubland, but its principal valence would likely just be the reader’s realization that “maquis� substititues for “forêt.� Monk took Adair to task for the inaccuracy of his translation, and there are certainly places where Adair’s license misrepresents the text. But in an average passage, like this, what could count as fidelity? When the lipogram forces the author to speak in tongues, switching one voice for another several times a sentence, how could any translation be faithful?)
Back to the English: in this one brief passage there are three styles: archaic or formal; Biblical or childish; and slightly awkward. Throughout A Void styles clash continuously: Latinate, scholarly, gruff, inept, childish, 18th century, 19th century, bureaucratic, enigmatic, oracular, stentorian, informal, journalistic. The voices multiply relentlessly, producing a situation in which a reader has, I think, two choices: either be repeatedly distracted by kaleidoscopic changes of tone and style, which are clearly not Perec’s concern or even reproductions of such changes in the original French, or stop reading in the ways we have all been accustomed to read literary fiction and think of A Void as a conceptual experiment, as reviewers have done.
The difficulty in opting for the general, conceptual reading is that A Void isn't structured like Goldsmith's Day, Traffic, Sports, or others: A Void has a narrative, and makes use of many structures and clichés of fiction. Skimming or sampling the book, or taking the accomplishment of the lipogram as a sufficient description, ignores Perec’s elaborate play with all sorts of narrative forms (especially detective fiction), not to mention his allusions to Borges and Roussel, which are his main models for the central enigma. If the book had no such allusions—if it were uniform like Goldsmith’s experiments—then it would be justified to ignore the stylistic irregularities—as a reader can, for example, in books like Christian Bök’s Xenotext, one of the most impressive recent experiments with constraints.
(A couple of notes on the allusions. It is crucial to recognize, on p. 139 of Adair’s translation [p. 156 in the original] an allusion to a line by Roussel, which he uses in his book How I Wrote Certain of My Books to explain his writing method:
"Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard."
"The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table."
In Perec’s book, this is the mysterious white marks on the billiard table that are later deciphered—“L’inscription du Blanc sur un Bord du Billard.� It’s also significant that Roussel himself almost never followed his own rule, and must have had many more—just as Perec, in this book, announces his lipogram and clearly (to me!) must have followed many more unnanounced constraints.
It's also important to recognize Borges’s two stories, “The Aleph� (called “Alpha� in A Void and “The Zahir� [p. 117]. This is argued in Pablo Martín Ruiz’s “Perec, Borges, and a Silent Solution for La Disparition,� MLN, 2012.)
The relentless combination of brilliant, adequate, and problematic solutions to avoiding the letter "e," together with the mad variety of styles, historical periods, authors, dialect, patois, and ventriloquized writers' styles conjured by those different solutions makes A Void an experiment in hokey and apparently inept writing. I assume this has to be true of the two or three other English translations and the fifteen or so translations into other languages. I have been shown the Japanese, Russian, and German translations, each of which has a different strategy for omitting a vowel sound. But it’s not easy to imagine how a translation in to any language could avoid the unmotivated heterogeneity of styles in Adair’s translation or in the original.
I don't see evidence in what Perec wrote or said that he intended these effects. In the penultimate section, he says his experiment took him down “many intriguing linguistic highways and byways,� and that he honed his “writing skills� with “inspiration� and “not without occasional humor.� My sense is that he experienced his experiment as a delightful diversion, requiring all sorts of clevernesses. I don’t see how a careful, attentive reading can correspond to that sort of description. My interest in Perec’s or Adair’s virtuosity wore off in the first fifty pages. After that, their infelicities, awkwardnesses, and unplanned allusions to other modes of writing occupied more of my attention. A hundred or so pages into the book, comparing it with the original, I decided neither the author nor the translator seemed to experience the shifting styles and voices as annoyances or distractions—and that that point my reading diverged both from what I imagine as Perec’s intentions and from what I’ve characterized as the principal critical reception.
These thoughts apply variably, and only in part, to Perec's other texts. It’s the lipogram, especially, that produces the tumultuous inadvertent tour through literary history that has to be resolutely ignored in order to go on praising the book’s astonishing technical achievement. As a manifestation of the clinamen—the swerve or diversion from normalcy that the Oulipeans imagined as a source of freedom—an extensive lipogrammatic novel has the virtue of being pure swerve, pure diversion, and as far as I’m concerned also pure lack of expressive freedom.
The large issue I’ve tried to suggest here isn’t exhausted by A Void or La Disparition. I suspect there are many more undiscovered constraints at work in the book, but as in Life A User’s Manual, some constraints produce unexpected tonal shifts, changes in the narrator’s voice, and echoes of other literary styles. Oulipo seems to have been resolute in its disregard of those effects: the notion was that style could be reimagined as an ornamental or amusing side effect of the deeper operations of constrained writing. That has never been true, except for people who read quickly, looking only for the solutions of puzzles.
In the popular reception, Perec's book is considered as a linguistic marvel. But that's just praising virtuosity: as an accomplishment, Gilbert Adair’s A Void (1995), one of the English translations of La Disparition (1969), is exemplary, but what is it as a reading experience? Critics treat it, in effect, as a book of conceptual poetry, like Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget (2000, nearly contemporaneous with the English translation), a transcription of his movements that does not ask to be read from first page to last.
Perec himself helpfully gives reasons for his experiment in the final chapter. As far as I know this hasn’t received a close reading. I won’t try that here, except to say that ]Perec wanted the book to be a “stimulant... [for] fiction-writing today� and a “wilfully conflictual� provocation “vis-à-vis fiction.� For an ideal reader, then, this book might be a model indicating the kind of radical strategies that have to be adopted to make the novel a viable form. That formulation is consistent with the primary purpose of Oulipo, to provide models for literature. But it is also a full-length novel, unlike so many of Oulipo’s proposals and formulations.
In the years since A Void (1995), the , and the , a large scholarly literature has appeared on this and other books that operate by the rule of the lipogram. Much of it focuses either on Perec’s elision of his own earlier life and the holocaust, or on the social context of Oulipo and Perec's practice. (For example Warren Motte. "Pereckonings," in Yale French Studies, 2004; a good review is Heather Mawhinney, "Vol du Bourdon," Modern Language Review 97, 2002). These academic approaches are similar to the online and newspaper reviews in that they tend to focus on meanings that emerge from the book as a whole rather than the reader's page-by-page puzzlement.
The difficulty, for me, is in squaring Perec's and others' interest in the abstract challenge of omitting the letter "e" with the experience of reading, which is anything but generalized. In order for the book to operate as Perec seems to have hoped, the avoidance of the letter "e" has to be seen as putting variable but continuous pressure on ordinary narration: the void has to have an abstract effect, turning the reader's thoughts to questions of what comprises expected forms of narration and what happens when they are diverted. The book can then become a provocation aimed at "fiction" in general, not by virtue of its single idea and strategy, but by way of its many individual departured from expected conventions of narration and description. Likewise, in order for the book to operate as an instance of the void evoked in W, the avoidance of the letter "e" has to be of interest mainly for its continuous troubling absence.
In the critical reception, there is no place for what is normally called "style" or "voice": they are taken to be deliciously mangled by the omission of "e"s. This is true especially in post-Oulipean conceptual writing. (See Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito's "End of Oulipo?," reviewed by Mitchell Kerley in SubStance 47, 2018.)
Yet I think it needs to be said that what happens in reading is quite different from what's implied by the book's critical reception or by the injunction not to read for expression, style, or voice. The overall narrative is cleverly arranged so that the persistent and almost always unnoticed absence of the letter "e" from the lives of the characters is what produces their deaths. But at the level of sentences, phrases, and word choices, the void is often more annoying and repetitive than enabling. Here is an example, using Adair's English translation. The issue here is not how faithful the translation is, or how clever the original choice in French, but what expressive effect Adair’s choices have on reading.)
"Miraculously, though, Albin got out of Tirana by night and, hiding out in a thick, dark, almost fairy-story wood, would languish in it for all of six springs and six autumns, a half-moribund survivor...' (p. 159)
The phrase, "half-moribund survivor," is apparently a substitute for "half-dead." The book is replete with examples of complex, Latinate words substituting for simpler, Anglo-Saxon ones. The result tends to be quirky archaism and unexpected formality.
(In Perec’s original it’s of course different:
“Albin, donc, put fuit, gagnant un profond maquis où, huit ans durant, il stagna, survivant, mi-moribond…� (p. 177).
Perec could have chosen “moribond,� but he may have had in mind “� demi-mort.� The odd word, “mi-moribond,� isn’t archaic—to me it sounds whimsical, the sort of thing a dedicated lipogrammatist might invent.)
There are many passages in Adair’s translation that sound archaic, formal, stiff or outdated. It's different with "all of six springs and six autumns." The book is also full of versions of that phrase � "20 springs," "six springs," and so on. All those are presumably to avoid the word "years." Now that's not a problem in French, where it’s just “huit ans,� but it is typical of Adair’s translation. “Six springs and six autumms� sounds Biblical to me, and also like a children’s narrative.
It's different again with "fairy-story wood," which sounds like a substitute for "fairy-tale forest." It’s neither archaic nor Biblical. If it has an expressive value, it's just the fleeting annoyance I feel at guessing why Adair chose it.
(Of course my guess would be wrong, because Adair invented the fairy-tale part: but my concern here is how the English reads, not its fidelity. In French, as always, it’s different: “maquis� is “thicket,� “scrubland,� or just “bush,� and in context presumably “wasteland� or even “wildnerness.� It might conjure thoughts of the French resistance, hiding in the scrubland, but its principal valence would likely just be the reader’s realization that “maquis� substititues for “forêt.� Monk took Adair to task for the inaccuracy of his translation, and there are certainly places where Adair’s license misrepresents the text. But in an average passage, like this, what could count as fidelity? When the lipogram forces the author to speak in tongues, switching one voice for another several times a sentence, how could any translation be faithful?)
Back to the English: in this one brief passage there are three styles: archaic or formal; Biblical or childish; and slightly awkward. Throughout A Void styles clash continuously: Latinate, scholarly, gruff, inept, childish, 18th century, 19th century, bureaucratic, enigmatic, oracular, stentorian, informal, journalistic. The voices multiply relentlessly, producing a situation in which a reader has, I think, two choices: either be repeatedly distracted by kaleidoscopic changes of tone and style, which are clearly not Perec’s concern or even reproductions of such changes in the original French, or stop reading in the ways we have all been accustomed to read literary fiction and think of A Void as a conceptual experiment, as reviewers have done.
The difficulty in opting for the general, conceptual reading is that A Void isn't structured like Goldsmith's Day, Traffic, Sports, or others: A Void has a narrative, and makes use of many structures and clichés of fiction. Skimming or sampling the book, or taking the accomplishment of the lipogram as a sufficient description, ignores Perec’s elaborate play with all sorts of narrative forms (especially detective fiction), not to mention his allusions to Borges and Roussel, which are his main models for the central enigma. If the book had no such allusions—if it were uniform like Goldsmith’s experiments—then it would be justified to ignore the stylistic irregularities—as a reader can, for example, in books like Christian Bök’s Xenotext, one of the most impressive recent experiments with constraints.
(A couple of notes on the allusions. It is crucial to recognize, on p. 139 of Adair’s translation [p. 156 in the original] an allusion to a line by Roussel, which he uses in his book How I Wrote Certain of My Books to explain his writing method:
"Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard."
"The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table."
In Perec’s book, this is the mysterious white marks on the billiard table that are later deciphered—“L’inscription du Blanc sur un Bord du Billard.� It’s also significant that Roussel himself almost never followed his own rule, and must have had many more—just as Perec, in this book, announces his lipogram and clearly (to me!) must have followed many more unnanounced constraints.
It's also important to recognize Borges’s two stories, “The Aleph� (called “Alpha� in A Void and “The Zahir� [p. 117]. This is argued in Pablo Martín Ruiz’s “Perec, Borges, and a Silent Solution for La Disparition,� MLN, 2012.)
The relentless combination of brilliant, adequate, and problematic solutions to avoiding the letter "e," together with the mad variety of styles, historical periods, authors, dialect, patois, and ventriloquized writers' styles conjured by those different solutions makes A Void an experiment in hokey and apparently inept writing. I assume this has to be true of the two or three other English translations and the fifteen or so translations into other languages. I have been shown the Japanese, Russian, and German translations, each of which has a different strategy for omitting a vowel sound. But it’s not easy to imagine how a translation in to any language could avoid the unmotivated heterogeneity of styles in Adair’s translation or in the original.
I don't see evidence in what Perec wrote or said that he intended these effects. In the penultimate section, he says his experiment took him down “many intriguing linguistic highways and byways,� and that he honed his “writing skills� with “inspiration� and “not without occasional humor.� My sense is that he experienced his experiment as a delightful diversion, requiring all sorts of clevernesses. I don’t see how a careful, attentive reading can correspond to that sort of description. My interest in Perec’s or Adair’s virtuosity wore off in the first fifty pages. After that, their infelicities, awkwardnesses, and unplanned allusions to other modes of writing occupied more of my attention. A hundred or so pages into the book, comparing it with the original, I decided neither the author nor the translator seemed to experience the shifting styles and voices as annoyances or distractions—and that that point my reading diverged both from what I imagine as Perec’s intentions and from what I’ve characterized as the principal critical reception.
These thoughts apply variably, and only in part, to Perec's other texts. It’s the lipogram, especially, that produces the tumultuous inadvertent tour through literary history that has to be resolutely ignored in order to go on praising the book’s astonishing technical achievement. As a manifestation of the clinamen—the swerve or diversion from normalcy that the Oulipeans imagined as a source of freedom—an extensive lipogrammatic novel has the virtue of being pure swerve, pure diversion, and as far as I’m concerned also pure lack of expressive freedom.
The large issue I’ve tried to suggest here isn’t exhausted by A Void or La Disparition. I suspect there are many more undiscovered constraints at work in the book, but as in Life A User’s Manual, some constraints produce unexpected tonal shifts, changes in the narrator’s voice, and echoes of other literary styles. Oulipo seems to have been resolute in its disregard of those effects: the notion was that style could be reimagined as an ornamental or amusing side effect of the deeper operations of constrained writing. That has never been true, except for people who read quickly, looking only for the solutions of puzzles.
December 29, 2012
Holy shit!
(That's really all I wanted this review to be, but I've got to add two "complaints." 1) I WISH I had just happened upon this book without knowing what the "gimmick" (said with NO negative connotation!) was. Of course, I would have needed an edition that did not have this spoiler of a cover, either. My assumption is that most people, like me, now read this book simply because they've heard "it's that book with [or without]...." Just in case you're reading this and don't know, PLEASE just read the book without reading any other descriptions of it. Go. Now! The mystery of the book was as much, if not more, to do with said gimmick as with the ridiculous (again, NO negative connotation!) plot. How long would it have taken me to crack the conundrum? I'm not sure, and I can only imagine my utter astonishment when I did see the solution. If I could go back in time, one of my primary priorities would be to tell myself to read the book without knowing anything about it a priori. 2) I finished the book. What have my early morning hours become? A void. What is left of the few moments I can sneak in while Jameson naps? A void. What happens when I'm able to steal a few hours at my desk without any papers to grade? A void. What awaits me in the hours before sleep? A void. What do I have, at least, to continue to rave to everyone I talk to about? A Void!
(That's really all I wanted this review to be, but I've got to add two "complaints." 1) I WISH I had just happened upon this book without knowing what the "gimmick" (said with NO negative connotation!) was. Of course, I would have needed an edition that did not have this spoiler of a cover, either. My assumption is that most people, like me, now read this book simply because they've heard "it's that book with [or without]...." Just in case you're reading this and don't know, PLEASE just read the book without reading any other descriptions of it. Go. Now! The mystery of the book was as much, if not more, to do with said gimmick as with the ridiculous (again, NO negative connotation!) plot. How long would it have taken me to crack the conundrum? I'm not sure, and I can only imagine my utter astonishment when I did see the solution. If I could go back in time, one of my primary priorities would be to tell myself to read the book without knowing anything about it a priori. 2) I finished the book. What have my early morning hours become? A void. What is left of the few moments I can sneak in while Jameson naps? A void. What happens when I'm able to steal a few hours at my desk without any papers to grade? A void. What awaits me in the hours before sleep? A void. What do I have, at least, to continue to rave to everyone I talk to about? A Void!
February 9, 2017
I was disappointed with this book despite having high hopes for it. In homage to his father's passing, Perec took on the nearly impossible task of writing a book without the letter 'e' which in French is quite a challenge. The missing 'e' of course represents his father, but the story seems forced because of this constraint. I found that the narrative was not really that interesting and he ended up recycling some of the same expressions over and over again to ensure he got the length of the book to novel-length (in French, you must have 180000 characters for a book to go from a novella to a novel (or 'romain')). It became quite tedious. I felt I was looking for a slip of an 'e' in the text and obsessing with the missing 'e' and that this distracted me from really enjoying the book itself. I gave it three stars because technically it was a nearly impossible task, but it does not make for great reading. I have not attempted his Life Manual where he describes each of 100 apartments in a Parisian building because I was put off by this book. I guess for me the issue was similar to the questions I ask myself when I looked at a priceless Chinese jade sculpture of a cabbage with drops of dew and flies at the Taipei Palace Museum in Taiwan that looked so realistic that I thought if I reached out and touched it, it would be wet. No one will ever know who made it, but it was certainly a collective work that took decades. Is it craft? Certainly, but is it art? That is a similar question I asked myself about The Disparition, is it art or craft? I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder so you'll have to decide for yourself. I sided with craft on this one.
May 28, 2013
4.5 stars
"Vowl is missing!"
That’s corr ct: Anton Vowl, protagonist, nds up missing at on point. But pl nty of oth r vow ls ar missing as w ll, s ing as ‘A Void� is an incr dibl lipogram in � �. Not only did G org s P r c, whos first and last nam contain two 's, writ th ntir nov l in his nativ Fr nch without th ir l tt r � �, but th translator Gilb rt Adair, h of only on � � in his nam , has translat d it without � �'s into nglish, a languag so rif and rich with � �'s that it b gins with th l tt r(and capitaliz d to boot). Th last nam -- whil it wholly incapsulat s th conc it on many l v ls -- is actually among the l ast impr ssiv sl ights of hand in ‘A Void.�
"such a work of fiction could not allow a solitary lazy or random or fortuitous word, no approximation, no padding and no nodding; that, contrarily, its author has rigorously to sift all his words -- I say, all, from nouns down to lowly conjunctions -- as if totally bound by a rigid, cast-iron law!"
Said law gov rns th compl xly plott d book; that it can b r ad in at l ast two languag s without th common st l tt r d ploy d is a r markabl f at ind d. Asid from th xhibitionistic goal of the nov l, it's a hilarious r ad. Th l ngths P r c go s to avoid (A Void) th l tt r � � is at tim s hilariously absurd. Th fact is allud d to through m taphors, plot points, and asid s throughout the nov l.
"a truly amazing gift for linguistic obfuscation and would turn an innocuous communication into such hocus pocus that nobody could follow it"
But p rhaps th crazyi st thing is that th book is pr tty asy to follow, hocus pocus or not. It’s said -- wh th r tru or not -- that P r c wrot th book aft r a companion call d his bluff on b ing abl to writ in such a r strictiv way. P r c said it b cam “a spur to [his] imagination� furth r saying it “took [his] imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and byways�
"A void. Void of whom? Of what?"
I finish d th book, and found that n arly vry cr ativ m thod of rvi wing it s ms to hav alr ady b n us d. So I found anoth r way to do it, although it will sur ly b much mor difficult to r ad. As far as I am awar , it hasn’t b n don y t.
P r c imagin s th lik ly r ad r “rapt in a book, a work of fiction, constantly hoping for a solution, for a solution that’s driving him crazy by lurking just out of his grasp, a solution that has had throughout, in fact from its first word, an infuriating habit of staring at him whilst continually avoiding his own scrutiny, might find, advancing into its story, nothing but ambiguous mystification and rationalisation, obscurantism and obfuscation, all of it consigning to a dim and murky chiaroscuro that ambition, so to say, that lit its author’s lamp.�
Now, P r c did not writ his nov l in th Fr nch or hav it translat d by Adair in th way I hav pr s nt d this r vi w, with th simpl omission of th l tt r � �, ss ntially cr ating a gap, or -- pun incr dibly int nd d -- a void. Rath r than cr ating a void, so obvious as I hav , ‘A Void� tak s th circuitous road: h avoids th � � ntir ly; ind d, th � � is not a void at all but something ntir ly in xist nt. My choic with r sp ct to th r moval is simpl : I hav writt n my r vi w’s words as I wrot th m, th n d l t d th � ‘s to show how oft n th y ar us d in normal s ttings. Th italiciz d portions ar quot s from th nov l, which r ad unimp d d by th r straint I’v appli d to my own words. This partially displays P r c’s g nius. Although th r straint would s m to limit his ability of conv ying a point and a comp lling story, h st ps up to th plat and d liv rs to th xt nt that it s ms ffortl ss. You grow to lov and hat him for th sam r ason: h shouldn’t hav b n abl to do what h did to th xt nt that h did it with th clarity of his vision and narrativ so cog ntly forg d. Lik Kany said, “No on man should hav all that pow r.�
"Vowl is missing!"
That’s corr ct: Anton Vowl, protagonist, nds up missing at on point. But pl nty of oth r vow ls ar missing as w ll, s ing as ‘A Void� is an incr dibl lipogram in � �. Not only did G org s P r c, whos first and last nam contain two 's, writ th ntir nov l in his nativ Fr nch without th ir l tt r � �, but th translator Gilb rt Adair, h of only on � � in his nam , has translat d it without � �'s into nglish, a languag so rif and rich with � �'s that it b gins with th l tt r(and capitaliz d to boot). Th last nam -- whil it wholly incapsulat s th conc it on many l v ls -- is actually among the l ast impr ssiv sl ights of hand in ‘A Void.�
"such a work of fiction could not allow a solitary lazy or random or fortuitous word, no approximation, no padding and no nodding; that, contrarily, its author has rigorously to sift all his words -- I say, all, from nouns down to lowly conjunctions -- as if totally bound by a rigid, cast-iron law!"
Said law gov rns th compl xly plott d book; that it can b r ad in at l ast two languag s without th common st l tt r d ploy d is a r markabl f at ind d. Asid from th xhibitionistic goal of the nov l, it's a hilarious r ad. Th l ngths P r c go s to avoid (A Void) th l tt r � � is at tim s hilariously absurd. Th fact is allud d to through m taphors, plot points, and asid s throughout the nov l.
"a truly amazing gift for linguistic obfuscation and would turn an innocuous communication into such hocus pocus that nobody could follow it"
But p rhaps th crazyi st thing is that th book is pr tty asy to follow, hocus pocus or not. It’s said -- wh th r tru or not -- that P r c wrot th book aft r a companion call d his bluff on b ing abl to writ in such a r strictiv way. P r c said it b cam “a spur to [his] imagination� furth r saying it “took [his] imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and byways�
"A void. Void of whom? Of what?"
I finish d th book, and found that n arly vry cr ativ m thod of rvi wing it s ms to hav alr ady b n us d. So I found anoth r way to do it, although it will sur ly b much mor difficult to r ad. As far as I am awar , it hasn’t b n don y t.
P r c imagin s th lik ly r ad r “rapt in a book, a work of fiction, constantly hoping for a solution, for a solution that’s driving him crazy by lurking just out of his grasp, a solution that has had throughout, in fact from its first word, an infuriating habit of staring at him whilst continually avoiding his own scrutiny, might find, advancing into its story, nothing but ambiguous mystification and rationalisation, obscurantism and obfuscation, all of it consigning to a dim and murky chiaroscuro that ambition, so to say, that lit its author’s lamp.�
Now, P r c did not writ his nov l in th Fr nch or hav it translat d by Adair in th way I hav pr s nt d this r vi w, with th simpl omission of th l tt r � �, ss ntially cr ating a gap, or -- pun incr dibly int nd d -- a void. Rath r than cr ating a void, so obvious as I hav , ‘A Void� tak s th circuitous road: h avoids th � � ntir ly; ind d, th � � is not a void at all but something ntir ly in xist nt. My choic with r sp ct to th r moval is simpl : I hav writt n my r vi w’s words as I wrot th m, th n d l t d th � ‘s to show how oft n th y ar us d in normal s ttings. Th italiciz d portions ar quot s from th nov l, which r ad unimp d d by th r straint I’v appli d to my own words. This partially displays P r c’s g nius. Although th r straint would s m to limit his ability of conv ying a point and a comp lling story, h st ps up to th plat and d liv rs to th xt nt that it s ms ffortl ss. You grow to lov and hat him for th sam r ason: h shouldn’t hav b n abl to do what h did to th xt nt that h did it with th clarity of his vision and narrativ so cog ntly forg d. Lik Kany said, “No on man should hav all that pow r.�
June 8, 2017
Anlamak ve odaklanmak için en çok kafa yorduğum kitaplardan oldu. Sıradışı bir yapısı var romanın ve aslında roman demek de ne kadar doğru bilmiyorum. İlginç, düşündürücü, farklı bir çalışma.
October 26, 2019
Nahezu unlesbar diese Lektüre ohne „e�. Wer möchte solches überhaupt? Habe lediglich die Einführung sowie ein einziges Kapitel geschafft, bevor meine Geduld endete. Keine Chance weiterzulesen. Verstehe ebenso wenig die Veranlassung dieses Experiments. Eine Wette? Hätte meiner Einsicht gemäß unter Verschluss gehalten werden sollen.
Gebe hiermit der Welt der Leser wenigstens einige der „e� wieder her, denn jedes der Wörter dieses Reviews enthält ein solches.
This work is licensed under a .
Gebe hiermit der Welt der Leser wenigstens einige der „e� wieder her, denn jedes der Wörter dieses Reviews enthält ein solches.
This work is licensed under a .
November 27, 2014
An amazing, frustrating, frivolous absurdity of a book. Consumption of a void is akin to watching a dog play Mozarts most popular hits on a harpsichord. You applaud Spot`s instructors bragadaccio but any appraisal of musical quality is moot. In A Void`s plot is a soap drama of ironic stupidity in stark contrast to its amazing wordplay. Anton Vowl has vanished and soon his flock of pals start dying in highly idiotic ways. Not that you in any way mind, as I was far too busy admiring the singular primacy of words, in fact linguistic bravura in writing a thick book without using our most common linguistic building block and in so doing dismissing plot to labor. Ridiculous but oh so charming.
February 20, 2011
what an amazing book. this is a 285 page novel that doesn't contain a single letter e. not only that, but it was originally written in french without a single e and then translated into english with the same criteria. that must have been one of the most difficult translating jobs ever.
and what's even more fantastic is the book actually basically makes sense, has a plot of sorts, and is actually a joy to read.and it's fun,because it is quite amusing in parts.i really can't think of much more to say about this book except that if you like offbeat literature, then this is definitely the book for you.and one more thing; when you see the picture of the author on the back cover of the book,you won't be surprised that he wrote a crazy book like this.
and what's even more fantastic is the book actually basically makes sense, has a plot of sorts, and is actually a joy to read.and it's fun,because it is quite amusing in parts.i really can't think of much more to say about this book except that if you like offbeat literature, then this is definitely the book for you.and one more thing; when you see the picture of the author on the back cover of the book,you won't be surprised that he wrote a crazy book like this.
June 2, 2019
Perec ve Cemal Yardımcı'nın kelime oyunları ve ustalıkları bir gerçek. Kitap sadece bir harf ve bir adamın kayboluş kitabı değil, bir ailenin yok oluş romanı. Kitabı tavsiye ediyorum. Dili ve yazımından dolayı çok ağır olmadığı düşüncesindeyim. Kitapta Türkler, Ankara, Atatürk kısımları ise ayrı bir güzeldi bu kitapta yer almasından dolayı.
January 14, 2016
This review will be written entirely without the letter--wait a second...Oh, hell!
December 5, 2017
A playful, lipogram, in which a syllabic sonant is vacant, ‘A Void� is a artistic travail which fits right into ‘Oulipo’s (brainchild of Raymond Q, alias Raymon Q. Knowall, �, in which the central aspiration was to rethink scholarly protocols follows the story of ‘Anton Vowl; a missing mad-man who is stuck in a continuous accumulation of fictional confabulations and has vanished from the world, leading to the a group of insouciant companions to conduct a chaotic and maniacal pursuit for him.
A soporific spiral of mishaps, a pasquil of various bookish forms, as a scholarly fantasy, ‘A Void� is no doubt a singular work of imagination; adulation is paid from Proust ‘Moby Dick� to cordial frolics which said author took a fancy to with quotidian constancy and various malapropisms typical patrolman fiction. A cast consist of bumbling assassins, pugnacious criminals and vamps, along with a conspiracy of global proportions, instils an air of whimsicality which can distract from how daring of said author’s pursuit of artistic originality is. On occasion, constant authorial distortion and lampooning can put off bilious bookworms who want to scan the words which the book consists of, but ‘A Void� is an unusual, regularly fun and farcical and occasionally irritating work of art.
A soporific spiral of mishaps, a pasquil of various bookish forms, as a scholarly fantasy, ‘A Void� is no doubt a singular work of imagination; adulation is paid from Proust ‘Moby Dick� to cordial frolics which said author took a fancy to with quotidian constancy and various malapropisms typical patrolman fiction. A cast consist of bumbling assassins, pugnacious criminals and vamps, along with a conspiracy of global proportions, instils an air of whimsicality which can distract from how daring of said author’s pursuit of artistic originality is. On occasion, constant authorial distortion and lampooning can put off bilious bookworms who want to scan the words which the book consists of, but ‘A Void� is an unusual, regularly fun and farcical and occasionally irritating work of art.
May 8, 2021
Kaybolmuş bir harf... Altıncısı...
Kamplarda yakılan, hayvanmışcasına yaşatılan yitik bir insanlığın anısına kayıp bir harf... Zamanda, uzamda, orada, burada, dün, bugün varoluşa kaldırılan isyan bayrağı... Var olabilmenin sorgusunun zıttıyla yapılması... Yazına bir başkaldırı, yazara bir başkaldırı, okura bir başkaldırı...
Ama yavan bir anlatı...
Edit: Cemal Yardımcı'nın yaptığı işin de hakkını vermek istiyorum. Perec'in Fransızcada yaptığı işin çok daha zorunu Türkçede yapmış zira Perec hikayesini kurarken kelimeleri seçebilirdi ama Yardımcı çok daha kısıtlı bir alanda çalışmak zorundaydı. Yer yer zorlamalara başvurmak durumunda kalsa da sonuç olarak takdir edilesi bir çeviri. Kesinlikle cesaret edemezdim...
Kamplarda yakılan, hayvanmışcasına yaşatılan yitik bir insanlığın anısına kayıp bir harf... Zamanda, uzamda, orada, burada, dün, bugün varoluşa kaldırılan isyan bayrağı... Var olabilmenin sorgusunun zıttıyla yapılması... Yazına bir başkaldırı, yazara bir başkaldırı, okura bir başkaldırı...
Ama yavan bir anlatı...
Edit: Cemal Yardımcı'nın yaptığı işin de hakkını vermek istiyorum. Perec'in Fransızcada yaptığı işin çok daha zorunu Türkçede yapmış zira Perec hikayesini kurarken kelimeleri seçebilirdi ama Yardımcı çok daha kısıtlı bir alanda çalışmak zorundaydı. Yer yer zorlamalara başvurmak durumunda kalsa da sonuç olarak takdir edilesi bir çeviri. Kesinlikle cesaret edemezdim...
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September 28, 2016Garip bir kitaptı, bi kere hiç e harfi kullanmadan yazmış yazar kitabı, çevirmen de hiç e harfi kullanmadan çevirmiş. Burada dilin imkanlarını görmek gerçekten şaşırtıcı oldu benim için.
Kurgunun işleyişi de ilginçti, olayların gizemi bir yandan yavaş yavaş çözülürken, bir yandan da olaylar sürekli hız kazanıyor. Georges Perec'in okuduğum 3. kitabı, okudukça tanıyacağıma daha bi gizem kazanıyor benim için kendisi.
Bir de anlamadığım bir şekilde çevirmen kitabın bölümleri arasında kendisine de 2-3 sayfalık bölümler ayırmış ve olayın gidişatı ile ile ilgili eklemeler ve hükümlerde bulunmuş. Bana gereksiz ve anlamsız geldi kitabın gidişatına müdahele etmesi.
Kurgunun işleyişi de ilginçti, olayların gizemi bir yandan yavaş yavaş çözülürken, bir yandan da olaylar sürekli hız kazanıyor. Georges Perec'in okuduğum 3. kitabı, okudukça tanıyacağıma daha bi gizem kazanıyor benim için kendisi.
Bir de anlamadığım bir şekilde çevirmen kitabın bölümleri arasında kendisine de 2-3 sayfalık bölümler ayırmış ve olayın gidişatı ile ile ilgili eklemeler ve hükümlerde bulunmuş. Bana gereksiz ve anlamsız geldi kitabın gidişatına müdahele etmesi.
May 23, 2016
At first sight, this lippogrammatic story is simply a show of authorial skill and wit; notwithstanding, this unusual approach to writing, in which a rigid constraint applying to a glyph from basic Latin script (fifth from start) controls composition, allows for an amusing (although, at particular points, truly confusing) narration to unfold. Both author, of Oulipo acclaim, and translator Adair construct a brilliant compilation of noir motifs into a gripping conundrum. Any fan of wordplay or whodunits should not pass this up.
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