A Void

A Void, translated from the original French (), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, put out in 1969 by Georges Perec, written wholly without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints.

Plot summary A Void plot follows a group looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story's constraint risk fatal injury. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words, said: "This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown."

Major themes Georges Perec's direct kin passed away in World War II: his father as a GI, his mother in the Holocaust. Perec was brought up by his aunt and uncle. Warren Motte finds the lack of any e in the book as a stand-in for Perec's own notion of loss and spiritual limbo:

Translations It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void, for which he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1995. The Adair translation of the book also won the 1996 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Fiction.

Various English translations are titled A Vanishing by Ian Monk, Vanish'd! by John Lee, and Omissions by Julian West.

All translators have asked that the text follow the lipogrammatic constraint of the original work, avoiding the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. This precludes the use of words normally considered crucial such as ("I"), ("and"), and (masculine "the") in French, as well as "me", "be", and "the" in English. The Spanish version contains no a, which is the second most common suffix in the Spanish language (first being e), while the Russian version contains no о. In Japan, "A Void" contains no syllables with the sound "i" (, , , etc.) at all.

+ Other languages translations Language Author Title YearGerman Eugen Helmlé 1986Italian Piero Falchetta 1995Spanish Marisol Arbués, Mercé Burrel, Marc Parayre, Hermes Salceda and Regina Vega 1997 Swedish Sture Pyk 2000Russian Ales Astashonok-Zhgirovsky [Ischeznovenie] 2001Russian Valeriy Kislov [Ischezanie] 2005Turkish Cemal Yardımcı 2006 Dutch Guido van de Wiel 2009Romanian Serban Foarta 2010Japanese Shuichiro Shiotsuka [Emmetsu] 2010Croatian Vanda Mikšić 2012Portuguese José Roberto "Zéfere" Andrades Féres 2016Catalan Adrià Pujol Cruells 2017Polish René Koelblen and Stanisław Waszak 2022Finnish Ville Keynäs 2023

Versions

A Void

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