A Bilingual Lipogram
February 18th, 2008 | 
Category: George Perec (1936-1982) was a renowned, prize-winner French writer who could be described as a literary experimentalist. His most famous novel “La Vie mode d’emploi” ( a 600-page text translated into English with the title “Life: A User’s Manual” ) is a complex and masterly crafted tapestry of an apartment building in Paris, and the lives of its inhabitants. It won the “Prix Medicis” in 1978.
As a writer, Perec explored the creative potential of formal rules, anagrams, palindromes, mathematical word games, and other puzzles.
A Void - By George Perec
In 1969 he produced one of the most remarkable illustrations of constrained-writing , “La Disparition”, a 300-page detective novel written without the letter E. This modern and fun story, full of plots and sub-plots is considered one the most impressive lipogrammatic novel of all times. But perhaps even more astounding is the English translation, again with no “e”, achieved by Gilbert Adair in “The Void”, which earned him the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize.
The book opens with this paragraph:
“Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12:20. With a loud and languorous sign Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.”
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