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A Void
 
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A Void (Paperback)

by Georges Perec (Author), Gilbert Adair (Translator)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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A Void + Life: A User's Manual + Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Penguin Classics)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage Classics (3 Jan 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099512165
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099512165
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 63,022 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #2 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Perec, Georges
    #96 in  Books > Horror > Classic Horror

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Product Description

Product Description

Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl's past starts to cast its malignant shadow. This virtuoso story, chock-full of plots and subplots, shows the skill of both author and translator who impart all the action without a crucial grammatical prop: the letter 'e'.


About the Author

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.

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Customer Reviews

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "E's are good" ...?, 14 Nov 2008
By Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas "drkennydouglas" (Glasgow) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Okay, the temptation here is to write a lipogrammatical review, but to be honest - much as I enjoyed the examples below - there is probably a need for a few "straight" reviews as well, to let everyone know what an extraordinary book this is.

A novel of more than 300 pages without the letter "E" is already impressive just as an intellectual feat, in sheer Guinness-book-of-records, well-fancy-that terms. It's hard enough in French, but arguably even harder in English, so full marks to Gilbert Adair for his black-belt skills in translation. (Think about it a moment: no "the"; no "he", "she", "we" or "they".)

However, while this is always a witty book and occasionally an overtly funny one (Perec's E-free translations of Hamlet's soliloquy and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are hilarious), this is a serious book, full of Perec's usual combination of gentle melancholy with serious philosophical questions.

Anton Vowl and his chums, representing the six vowels (with "Y" included) and disappearing one by one in bizarre and mysterious circumstances, know something is missing from their lives but can't figure what; indeed generally fail to make sense of their world. What does the missing "e" represent? What is our own missing "e"?

And isn't it scary how quickly, reading this book, we get used to the absence of something as commonplace as the most frequently used letter in the alphabet? (A possible metaphor for Europe after the Holocaust, or the like?)

Like all Perec, "A Void" is serious fun, but ultimately decidedly unsettling. He certainly makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Georges Perec - A Void, 12 Nov 2008
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
Remarkable! Though it is a more an intellectual exercise than an intelligible work of fiction (though, of course it *is* an intelligible work of fiction, otherwise the exercise would render itself pointless), a Void is delightful and delightfully clever experience. It strains credibility, credulity, and sometimes, through its oft-necessarily torturous syntax and plotting that internally reflects the conceit of a novel written with a vital piece missing, though concomitant then with an inability to mention it, but it's still fun throughout, often hilarious, and a very rewarding book to have read. Philosophical, full of big plots and little, it's a difficult read but a worthwhile one. Oh yes!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This you should study, ask not why, 7 Nov 2008
By Critch "Noumenon" (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
This significant book, who's linguistically cunning author calls for no introduction, strains against a troublingly unjust handicap... in fact, two. It informs of a tall story, that of Anton Vowl, a similar champion of virtuoso wordplay who is lost to a churning, sorrowful world without warning, thus provoking a fatal inquiry amongst bosom companions and distant contacts both, all of whom follow suit in shrugging off this mortal coil by turns - but within this account of bodily vanishings lurks a vast conundrum of non-inclusion, a puzzling confrontation orbiting around a pivotal lack so mammoth, so voluminous in its span as to thwart plausibility, whilst still so small as to prohibit our noticing it at all.

Still, this sacrificial act, this abdication, this hamstringing is an affliction which it inflicts by will, a pain which it truly wants, and no word said (nor any action) can or should bring a mitigatory balm to this masochistic, if not outright sadistic, mutilation. In a word - this book is an avowal (thank you) that no trick of lingual manipulation is out of bounds for our national patois, nor that of its Gallic originator. In this it triumphs grandly, though that victory occurs at a total cost of simplicity of communication, vigorously slamming shut its highly-wrought doors upon any unlucky digits of cursory curiosity too dozy to pull away. But what bounty awaits stoical inquiry - in particular a work of brilliant rhyming skill, amongst a (now painfully shorn) handful of gracious nods to prior wordsmiths of no small acclaim.

On an opposing, still thumb-sporting hand, it is to an additional cross (born out of admiration, I will admit, but anyway) that I must turn my angry focus upon. On first sight of its striking bindings this book displays its own solitary flaw, imparting a critical hint as to what is at hand; and in all writings on this topic it is as if divulging A Void's cryptic crux is a vital goal, as if baring its soul without just sanction is to show apt approbation or, put simply, to do it honour. Sadly, to my mind this only subtracts from any summing of its multifariously loquacious parts, and not as its author originally did.

It is, probably, possibly, a foolish wish, an Utopian illusion that such a book as this could both flourish and still maintain its ambiguous shroud; for who could withstand this typographic storm, who would voluntarily swallow such an occasionally sour tasting pill without knowing why, what man or woman is willing to climb so high an obstruction as this, with no conscious motivation for attaining its final summit? How fitting, though, how chivalrous to abstain: to stand back from broadcasting all, from shouting on rooftops, from crowing with abandon; from cutting to, and out, its pounding corazón and draining off its blood; to simply say, "this you should study, ask not why".

In fact, I cannot bring my own musings to a conclusion in such a way as to risk committing a similarly criminal act on my part. What can I say to sum up my thoughts? Ah, I know - though in choosing my closing words I may unwittingly clarify, not mask. But I shall stop writing now with this, in summary of A Void:

Georges Perec's exemplary achievement - deliberate elementary absence, ever expressed, never revealed - comprehensively exceeds expectations. However, foreknowledge undermines these endeavours; excessively free reviewers threaten depreciating every newcomer's revelatory experience. Perec's perfectly perforated, entirely incomplete, pervasively evasive piece deserves better; mere readers likewise.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome !
I read this book years ago, after it was mentioned in an editorial of a magazine I was reading. Totally intregued, I went straight out and bought it. Read it. Read more
Published 14 months ago by J. Pickering

5.0 out of 5 stars An amusing floccinaucinihilipilification
Random thoughts on first coming into contact with this book:
1. Which imp is disposing of a particular mark throughout this folio?
2. Read more
Published 14 months ago by JAMES MACKAY

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