Eunoia

"Eunoia, which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels."

The concept behind this book is intriguing: Five chapters, one devoted to each vowel, that vowel being the only to occur in its chapter. This could go one of two ways: Clearly, it's a wordsmithing exercise and could easily be what I refer to as "mental masturbation," or it could end up being delightfully euphonic and imaginative.

I feel Bök was striving for the latter but that the result was closer to the former. There were certainly moments, as images ethereal flitted by, evoked by words that, because of the nature of the exercise, flowed from subject to seemingly disparate subject in what felt like stream of consciousness. But then show more there was the awkwardness, as the meanings of words were drastically bent to make them fit the exercise, foreign-language phrases substituted for wrong-vowelled English words, and laundry lists of words gratuitously thrown in. In the end, rather than being delightful to read, I found it mostly tedious.

Eunoia describes itself as a novel, but it's more like a prose poem or concept piece. The only chapter that has any coherent sense of plot is Chapter E, a retelling of The Iliad. (Other chapters have plots, but they are so absurd and disjointed that I can't take them seriously.)

Now, my friends know that I am anything but a prude, but I found it just a bit disturbing that every chapter contained graphic sex. Then I read the explanatory pages at the very end and it made more sense:

"Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire…. The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary…. The letter Y is suppressed."

These final few pages should really have been a preface. I might have enjoyed the text more as a word game of sorts had I been aware of these subsidiary rules instead of attempting to parse it as a story.

There is more to Eunoia than the exercise in assonance. After the five single-vowelled chapters there is a small collection of "poems". These are also wordsmithing exercises, but they are more enjoyable to read. The elegy for the letter W is particularly delightful.

In conclusion, if you like clever, challenging word exercises, you might enjoy Eunoia. But if, like me, you're looking for more, you're likely to find it rather tedious. show less

But why does Bök cripple the interest of his book by using Perec-style rules of inclusion: 'All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage' (that is from Bök's Afterword, called 'The New Ennui'). Yes, the language is mesmerizing, and it's true that Oulipo-style restrictions, as in Perec's work, can produce unpredictable and consistently fascinating distortions of conventional narrative lines and ordinary usages. Those inventions owe their hypnotic quality to the fact that a reader can't decipher the tone, the voice, the style of the text because language is continuously deviated by rules that have nothing to do with ordinary show more narrative. All that is well known, and enjoyed, by fans of Roussel, Perec, and the other Oulipo writers. I entirely agree, and that is why I bought this book. But there is a second-order logic that is missing from Oulipo, and it becomes evident here. Why insist on just that assemblage of disparate narrative elements (the nautical scene, etc.)? Superficially, because it is yet another apparently random, willful restriction on conventional writing.

But that is only a superficial answer, and the lack of a better answer goes to a blindness in Oulipo. Consider the reader interested in the passages that 'allude to the art of writing.' Consider the momentary annoyance such a reader feels as the narrative inevitably swerves aside to accommodate the 'culinary banquet.' Annoyance and 'chafing' (one of Robbe-Grillet's words) is integral to the project of Oulipo, but not that specific annoyance. It remains at the level of ordinary narrative engagement, and is not folded back into the new experience generated by the rule-bound text. This book, and some of Perec's, would be so much stronger if the choice of mandatory subjects, and the transitions between them, were motivated at the level of the language, and not at the level of the critique of literary forms. As a reader, I relish annoyance: I don't mind it, and I actually look for it. But I want to know that it resonates with the act of reading, and not just with a loose, unjustified, arbitrary accumulation of generative rules. show less

This book is definitely an acquired taste, and one which I would recommend only to people who love words, word games, and linguistic oddities. It just so happens that I’m one of those people. The majority of Eunoia consists of five chapters; A, E, I, O, and U. Each is dedicated to its title vowel, the only vowel to occur within the chapter. The rest of the book is a section called ‘Oiseau’ and consists of a series of clever poems/word exercises.

The first five chapters were largely enjoyable, each managing to follow a story to a greater or lesser degree. Chapter E was absolutely outstanding - a retelling of the Iliad focusing upon Helen of Troy – and for this chapter alone Bök deserves a literary prize. At the very back of the show more book there are rules listed for what each chapter must contain, and although I think the rules should have been placed before the ‘Oiseau’ section I was pleased that they were included after the chapters. By introducing the rules after the reader had already worked through the chapters, and enjoyed them on their own merit, it allowed the chance to reread the stories and appreciate them in a new light. The only thing which really spoils these chapters is Bök’s insistence on adding rather pervy sex scenes: it’s utterly unnecessary.

The ‘Oiseau’ section is, if possible, even more obscure. The highlights have got to be the poem containing only the letters in the word ‘vowel’ and the ode to the letter W. I adored most of this book, and have a great deal of respect for Bök’s linguistic abilities, but feel I should point out that it is really not for the average reader. show less

Bok (excuse my keyboard's limited range of expression) has, in Eunoia and other works, shown a true mastery of language. The tone and rhythm of Eunoia are impeccable throughout. It reads, to me, with unusual musicality.

What I believe it is missing is a purpose. The meanings of the miniature epics are superficial and, to my ear, do not remain entirely coherent throughout even twenty contiguous pages. I think all of the critiques I have seen from the others here are correct, except perhaps the statement that the words "grate on the [...] ear"

Eunoia is a superior speciment of abstract art through the medium of poetry, and I recommend it very strongly. Unfortunately for me, I tend to find myself emotionally unmoved by abstract art in any show more medium. show less

The obvious temptation in reviewing Eunoia is to compose some cute sentences that mimic its style (not to worry, Christian Bök won’t be suffering that indignity here). This, of course, is because Eunoia is a brief novel (or long poem) comprising five chapters, each of which is univocally lipogrammatic: “Goons who shoot folks knock down doors, storm control rooms. Bronx cops do crowd control. Corps of shock-troops cordon off two blocks of shops to look for kooks who concoct knock-off bombs.â€? As if laboring under this restriction weren’t enough of a feat, Bök has employed virtually every word in the English language (and some from other tongues) that fits his parameters. Eunoia’s extensive vocabulary show more wasn’t derived with the aid of a computerized dictionary search, which explains why it was seven years in the making. While there may still be some readers who find this an insufficient pretext to justify even these few large-margined pages, they’d be remiss in overlooking them. Given the considerable historical body of experimental literature that gives a context to this work—Georges Perec and the Oulipo can’t go unmentioned—its premise is no more of a gimmick than a plot where boy meets girl. Even the least felicitous of Bök’s sentences has appeal as something no one will ever read under any other circumstances, and the best build on each other until they convince the reader that all other kinds of writing are anarchy. The quality of this work is so high that it’s a shame to focus solely on its form; it deserves a perversely oblivious critic blind to its technical achievements. Maybe it’s only years from now, when we’ve all been inspired to try our hand at linguistic gymnastics like these, that Bök’s language and the time he’s spent “divining its implicit tricksâ€? will truly be appreciated. show less

The beauty of books is that even if you show up late to the party you still get to say how AWESOME it was! :-)

Despite Eunoia being published close to 15 years ago, it's still a fascinating, amusing, and thought-provoking read - and Bök's concept is a successful creative exercise in combinatorial optimization with words. The constraints are rigorous, but the outcomes are brilliant.

Those readers who like word games and literary forensics should NOT stray to "The New Ennui" section (located at the very end of my edition) as this is where the subsidiary rules governing each piece are explained. However, if you're someone who likes a little help with interpreting what you're reading, these notes can be quite helpful - and in the end, show more facilitate a greater enjoyment of the project.

As an extra ???!!!, one online article I read about Eunoia (where, I have no recollection) stated that Bök had culled the complete word list for each univocal lipogram by going through a dictionary one page at a time. True or false, I have no idea. It's not a task most of us would relish, but I suppose it's an incredible (and effective) exercise in vocabulary expansion. show less

I was lucky to get a copy of the paperback version of this book as a prepublication copy through the member giveaway programme.

Eunoia is an amazing book - it is, to my mind, a book of poems in that the beauty of language is the focus more than the story.

The first five chapters are each dedicated to a vowel (in alphabetical order), and each chapter only contains words containing that voewl and no other. What is more, the author has constrained the stories in other ways and used the majority of all words that he could use in the writing.

After these five chapters there are other random experiments in language, such as the poem written only with the letters in the word "vowels".

I am very glad I read this book. It was an amazing feat of show more language that took the author 7 years to write (and the only surprise was that he could complete it at all). On the downside it is not an easy read! The constraints of the book make the language hard going. There were words there I had to look up (and I generally don't have that problem).

The mixture of words that in other works would be clearly pretentious with occasional gutter language also felt odd. Particularly in the "u" chapter, I was both impressed and dissapointed that the writer could describe sexual intercourse using just words with the "u" vowel - but imaginations will not run far as to which words he used. That rather sullied the beauty of the book in my opinion.

Hard going it might be, but this was not a long book and it was very much worth the read. Anyone who loves language cannot help but be impressed by what is achieved here. show less