| Title | : | A Void |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1567922961 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781567922967 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 284 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1969 |
| Awards | : | Scott Moncrieff Prize Gilbert Adair (1995) |
A Void Reviews
-
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……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. -
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 Goodreads policy reasons) -
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 -
KRITIK:
Against Constraint
Author and translator both warrant much approbation for this work of
lipogrammatic 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)
Ian Monk: "I should point out straight away that, in my opinion, writing without any particular symbol in this British idiom of ours is not, in fact, that hard. Anybody with an inch of wit can do it, which might hint at why lipogrammatic [writing] has not caught on in any Anglo-Saxon country."
(2)
Ian Monk: "I must say that I found it an amusing work in its own right but, as a translation, frankly disappointing"
(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:
Roxy Music - "Virginia Plain"
Au Pairs - "It's Obvious"
Phish - "Glass Onion"
Lucinda Williams - "What If?" -
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. -
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. -
A 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. -
“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
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... -
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 l’ (“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 l’.
(2) He relies on some very obscure and old words as replacements: e.g., choir instead of tomber (“fall”), ouir instead of écouter (“listen”), nonnain instead of nonne (“nun”).
(3) He uses slang words as replacements: e.g. nana instead of femme (“wife”).
(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 merçi. 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, “C’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 (“choice”).
(8) He’ll just break the grammar and spelling rules: e.g. l’oisir instead of le loisir (“leisure”) @ p261; m’uicidant 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”. -
Zeka ve dıygunun birleştiği okuduğum en iyi edebiyat oyunlarından biri.
-
So impressive, the lack of coherence or interest is irrelvant. Honestly. Try writing a sentence without an E. Go on. See? Five stars.
-
Occasionally 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.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 père and mère. 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 Wiesel’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 ::
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mcca...
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.
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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! -
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? -
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.
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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.” -
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.
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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
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. -
What is Oulipean "Style"?
In the popular reception, Perec's book is still considered as a linguistic marvel, or a translation marvel. But that's just praising virtuosity: if the book is as important as some of his others, the idea of omitting the letter "e" has to have other expressive effects.
Perec himself helpfully gives the reasons for his experiment in the penultimate section of the book. He says (1) the book might be a "stimulant... on fiction-writing today," (2) that it would be "a spur to [the] imagination," (3) that it might be a "wilfully critical" provocation "vis-a-vis fiction." The third of these is apparently intended to be the most substantial. For an ideal reader, then, this book might be a model (or at least a "provocation") indicating the kind of radical strategies that have to be adopted to make the novel a viable form.
I have no criticism of that ambition. In the years since "La Disparition" (1969) and "A Void" (1995), the two other unpublished English translations, and the half-dozen translations into other languages that have appeared since 2000, a large scholarly literature has appeared on this and other books that operate by the rule of the lipogram. (For the other English translations see Stephen Frug's excellent essay,
tinyurl.com/yazpa32t; for the half-dozen translations into other languages, see the French-language Wikipedia page on "la Disparition.") Much of the scholarly literature focuses on the politics of the void (and of Perec's autobiographical novel "W"), mourning, and related themes, 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) The academic approaches are similar to the online and newspaper reviews in that they also 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 might be done to overturn them. The book can then become a provocation aimed at "fiction" in general. 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 each kind of reading, there is no for what is normally called "style" or "voice": they are simply the deliciously mangled remnants of sentences that have had the letter "e" plucked out of them. In the reception of Oulipo, asking about style is a sort of faux pas, because it might be evidence that the reader has missed the point of the whole enterprise. The Oulipo is about "potential" literature, games and rules that might make a future literature. It's a provocation, not an example of the practices it avoids. That's quite true, and Oulipo is still very much a provocation despite recent critiques. (See Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito's "End of Oulipo?," reviewed for example 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 expressively (for "style"). The overall narrative is very 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:
"Miraculously, though, Albin got out of Tirana by night and, hiding out in a thick, dark, almost fairy-tale 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 is a quirky and often pleasing archaism and formality.
But it's different with "all of six spring and six autumns." The book is also replete with 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 the word would be "ans," but it is typical of the translation as a whole. "Springs" a silly and uninteresting repetition. I imagine it was necessary mainly because Perec didn't need to concern himself with "ans," and so used it more than he would have if it had included an "e."
"All of six spring and six autumns" produces a different effect than ""half-moribund survivor." It's different again with "fairy-story wood," which is presumably a substitute for "fairy-tale wood." That is not archaic or expressive. It sounds like a random choice. If it has an expressive value, it's just the very fleeting annoyance I feel at realizing what generated the expression "fairy-story."
These three different technical problems create three distinct expressive effects. They will remind a reader of different kinds of writing (Latinate, scholarly, gruff, inept, childish...). These three and many more identifiable and guessable solutions to avoiding the letter "e" combine and multiply relentlessly, producing a situation in which a reader has, I think, two choices: either stop reading in the ways we have all been accustomed to read literary fiction, and think of "A Void" as one enormous conceptual experiment, in the line that lead to Kenny Goldsmith, or continue reading as if this is normative fiction, and be continuously distracted by turns of phrase that seem unaccountably Latinate, strangely scholarly, inappropriately gruff, unaccountably inept, irrelevantly childish, and so on. 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 all the structures of fiction we have learned to name and analyze since New Criticism, or since Barthes. The many readers who seem to experience "A Void" as the product of a single rule end up taking a few exceptional passages to stand for a full reading. I think that is only possible if you skim the book, ignoring its stylistically ragged surface in favor of its single generative rule.
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 don't see evidence in what Perec wrote or said that he intended that effect. 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 full, careful, attentive reading of the book can correspond to that sort of description. My interest in Perec's virtuosity, and his translators' virtuosity, wore off in the first fifty pages. After that, their infelicities, awkwardnesses, and unplanned allusions to other modes of writing outweighed my general admiration for the accomplishment. A hundred or so pages in to the book, I realized neither the author nor the translator seemed to experience the many sorts of infelicities as annoyances -- and that that point my reading diverged from what I've characterized as the popular and scholarly receptions.
On the other hand: these thoughts apply to lipograms, and most of Perec's work has different constraints. 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. -
Le
James Joyce français, je soupçonne ? Comme Joyce, de toute façon, j'ai trouvé que ce livre était bien plus intéressant en tant qu'exercice de linguistique et de traduction—oui, soit dit en passant, il y a une traduction en anglais, et je dois avouer qu'elle est véritablement très impressionnante—que n'importe quoi de véritable valeur littéraire.
Trahir qui disparut dans « La disparition », ravirait au lisant subtil tout plaisir. Motus donc, sur l'inconnu noyau manquant—« un rond pas tout à fait clos finissant par un trait horizontal »—blanc sillon damnatif où s'abîma un Anton Voyl, mais où surgit aussi la fiction. Disions, sans plus, qu'il a rapport à la vocalisation. L'aiguillon paraîtra à d'aucun trop grammatical. Vain soupçon : contraint par son savant pari à moult combinaisons, allusions, substitutions ou circonclusions, jamais G.P. n'arracha au banal discours joyaux plus brillants ni si purs. Jamais plus fol alibi n'accoucha d'avatars si mirobolants. Oui, il fallait un grand art, un art hors du commun, pour fournir tout un roman sans ça. -
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. -
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. -
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... -
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.
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This review will be written entirely without the letter--wait a second...Oh, hell!
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Totally satisfying, though not for folks lacking stoicism and assiduity. Probably most highly thought of by souls familiar with and forgiving of structuralist and po-mo thought. I still cannot avoid basking in our author's playful adaptations of traditional familiar works, such as Ozymandias, Song of Solomon, and a short synopsis of Moby Dick. Playful and succinct (sort of), with not a Vowl too many.
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Bleatless dizzying bliss. Creation by omission. Literary Renaldo and the Loaf. Delicious as any Hambu Hodo I've ever heard. Krasznahorkai with a better sense of humor.
There is a plot that involves a why dunnit that will not appeal to most fans of mystery writing. Rather what Perec seems more interested in is a playful semiology of absence, an absence not a always a stark and empty void but but rather a void as structural signifier. This is a concept very easily understood by anybody with musical training. Scales are the notes and the spaces between the notes...harder to demonstrate that in a lipogram but it functions exactly the same way. Perec drops a library's worth of references throughout making for scholarly bliss in the Rabelais mode of a toast raised in appreciation of his readers willing to learn.
How hard is this? How impenetrable? It's not everyone that will make it through but I imagine if you're delving into Oulipo, you've come somewhat prepared. If not - read Rabelais, Jarry and perhaps Saussure or Lacan to prepare. Enjoy the word-play and don't be too worried about solving any plot-puzzles - Perec is nice enough to help you unfold things, but on his time. Oddly enough - it reads somewhat quickly as the translation really is a musical delight. You won't notice the lipogramatics - you shouldn't care other than knowing that it was a tool to enhance creativity - Oulipo. Don't bother asking why - Perec explains it all in a absolutely stunning afterward that might be the highlight of the near 300 pages.
This book mentions Chicago twice, Perec always seems to get Chicago in his books. He also talks: Rabelais, Jarry, Nerval, Foucault, Lacan, a bottle of '28 Château Mouton-Rothschild, Gorgonzola cheese and more flora and fauna that you'll ever get outside of Rabelais. I liked splashing around in his words like a pleasantly confused drunk in a toddler-pool. Very visceral - impossible to forget and a depth that wouldn't exhaust many yearly re-reads. Absolutely one of the greatest writers I've read as mentioned in the mid-reads notes - Rabelais' best student. -
If it was not only brilliant...
A rationalization or justification, or an account anyway, of A Void’s at first striking oddity of syntax, would only add to what's said, for said book is writ with a modus or approach in form, far beyond common or insignificant brio that the book displays in its postscript. Any stab at imitation, as is plain in this, a shot at calculating a kind of worth to such artistic shinanigans, can only act as a provocation to an I such as I, who also constructs narrations, as an invitation to my own imagination—tout court many things do grow through constraint! An imagination, through avoiding things, can’t but grow, word by word, going down many intriguing and oft unthought linguistic byways, amusing us all along its many winding paths! It works—in so many ways I can think of, by imagining brand-spanking x novo syntax only this instant born through linguistic gyrations, all around what A Void can and will not say—what it must, over all things, always and for all days avoid saying—its point or raison. And that, in conclusion, is its point. Almost without flaw! I found much joy in pouring my sight through A Void’s many folios and thinking upon its many, many voluntary omissions of a singular Vowl--Anton who's missing. -
Two stars; it's not that interesting. That said, the translator deserves twenty for translating a French novel that omits the letter E into an English novel that does the same. In French, if you drop all Es, you can still write the feminine singular form of the. Because we don't have an e-less version of "the," though, the verbal calisthenics that go into doing without the French "la" are pretty spectacular. I'm pushing it by filing A Void under read - I put it down a little over halfway through because a story must have been one of the many things lost in the translation.
For OULIPO work that manages to fit its own criteria while also being at least a little entertaining, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is much better.
