I'm fascinated by writing generated by formal restraints. Perec & Raymond Roussell are probably the 2 writers who pursued this approach the most. Perec's "La Disparition" wd be translated into English as "The Disappearance" but then the title wd have the letter "e" in it & the formal constraint of the whole bk is that "e" is missing. As such, translator Gilbert Adair had to not only translate the sense of the bk but had to also translate the form of it by excluding the letter "e". Given that "e" is the most commonly used letter in both French & English, this is phenomenally difficult. At any rate, he did an EXCELLENT job. Astonishingly enuf, I've been told that there's also a translation by Harry Mathews (another OuLiPo writer). I've never seen that one. It wd be interesting to take the 2 translations together & do something w/ them -maybe recombine them & translate them back into French using ONLY words containing "e". This is yet-another bk in my top-10 favorites. Perec has TWO bks in that list. Alas, there're probably at least 20 bks in my top 10 so waddya make of that? ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Not to be undertaken without a dictionary, a Who's Who, and possibly an atlas in hand. It reminded me at times of The Crying of Lot 49 with its mysterious conspiracies and unnamed signifier. But it ultimately bogged down under its own cleverness. ( )

This is a perfect test-case for literature of constraint. Perec's constraint is tied to the content of his work (i.e., people die when they realize all the es are missing); his work is interesting independently of the constraint (i.e., it's funny and reflects on the literary tradition); in short, the *point* of the book is not the constraint itself.

I have no idea how seriously we're meant to take Perec's 'Postscript,' in which he more or less interprets the work for us. It is, he says, more or less an attempt to produce a text that is pure signifier, without signified; a structure removed from any concrete referent. He does this in order to criticize the French literature of his time, which he describes as all moralizing, psychologization, and a fetish for the old French 'virtues' of clarity, proportion etc... He wants to take us back to the literature of Rabelais and Tristram Shandy.

Say we take this seriously; I like most of that just fine. And yet much of this book is instantly forgettable. The spiralling plots certainly call to mind older forms of storytelling, but Perec's work lacks the basic good humor of those two older books. It feels mechanical at times; the parallels between Perec's 'characters' and other myths seem like repetitions for the sake of it rather than meaningful.

That's because Perec's book doesn't point to anything other than itself. The ridiculous plots remind me of Pynchon--whose books point out of themselves. The mania reminds me of the eighteenth century authors--ditto. I'm not the only one to feel this way; some critics argue that the missing 'es' are symbolic of the Jews murdered by Nazis et al. That's quite a stretch, but it shows the problem with this kind of literature as a whole--people like art (as distinct from entertainment) that offers them something other than itself. A Void is great entertainment, but it's also empty.

Anyway, conceptualism is one of the big trends in contemporary writing; much of it revolves around constraints. I'm skeptical, and Perec's book helped me to think through my attitude. I'll keep thinking.

On a side note, Gilbert Adair's translation is amazing. It's one thing to write a novel about whatever you want without the letter 'e' in it (impressive); it's another thing to translate a book without using the letter 'e'. He certainly deserved his prize. It's also a clinic on the difficulties of using the present tense. ( )