A Void

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary translation
Review: "A void" is Gilbert Adairs translation of Georges Perec's "La Disparation". The classic story tells the story of the disappearance of Anton Vowl and the sense of loss that comes because of this. And this book is without a single E. The letter, that is. The story is originally french, and was written without the letter E. This translation is remarkable in that Adair has managed to retell the story with the same limitations imposed by Perec.

Rating:
Summary: A stupendous feat of verbal acrobatics
Review: Half the fun of reading Perec's "A Void" is when you're about halfway through a sentence, or even a paragraph, and you know you've figured out what Perec is trying to say, and you can't imagine how in hell he's ever going to say it without using the letter "E". The other half of the fun is simply because this is an amazing book, with a plot and style that both echo the central conceit of the novel in an awe-inspiring fashion. I've not read the French original version, so I cannot comment of the fidelity of translation, but I thought that Adair's translation was immensely readable and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: A Void: A peculiar piece of literature
Review: Half the fun of reading Perec's "A Void" is when you're about halfway through a sentence, or even a paragraph, and you know you've figured out what Perec is trying to say, and you can't imagine how in hell he's ever going to say it without using the letter "E". The other half of the fun is simply because this is an amazing book, with a plot and style that both echo the central conceit of the novel in an awe-inspiring fashion. I've not read the French original version, so I cannot comment of the fidelity of translation, but I thought that Adair's translation was immensely readable and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: More than a Void
Review: I just don't get the point of those who rated that book with only one or two stars. It can't be lower than five. Some of the reviewers wrote here that it is a tour de force to write a book without using the letter "E". But Perec do more than that: he tells us, page after page, that the "E" is missing. Moreover, he tells us that he is telling us that the "E" is missing. The book must not be read only to discover that missing "E", but for all the details that tell us of that void. Perec transforms other texts in lipograms: Poe, Melville, Hugo, Flaubert, etc. That book is simply unbelievable. I did'nt read the translation, but I must congratulate the translator who decided to do that translation. It is a more difficult tour de force than Perec did himself. Simply remarquable!

Rating:
Summary: An odd and painful quandry, but truly amazing.
Review: In words that twist within a mighty bind, a dark void winds away to worlds known but not any I can show. In this book a constant hum runs just out of mind's ability to grasp. Although many draw nigh, no pilgrim grabs it's ring of brass. Will you?

A quandry; a missing part runs far within this book but is not shown. All talk, but say naught of this void. Oh longing, may this book fulfill. It has not any of a mainstay in our world. Try it on your own, The pain is worth it, so says I who has been through this hurt upon my own. It is truly amazing.

NOTE: Not to be included in this review!! This book is a murder mystery written entirely without the letter "e" (as is this feeble review). The translator is a true genius as much as the author. His rendering of Poe's "Raven" is by itself a literary achievement of significant note, not to mention the rest of the book. Although the language is necessarily tortured and convoluted, the story flows along brilliantly. Just as a character begins to get close to uncovering the reality of the missing letter, he is done away with. For those with the stamina, a truly worthwhile read

Rating:
Summary: Take my vowel. Please.
Review: Man, this book was painful. Once the find-the-"e" game gets stale (about page 8), the rest of the novel is a tedious exercise in literary masochism. The only thing more amazing than the fact some guy wrote a book without using the letter "e" is that another guy came along and translated it into English. Even Perec himself apologizes for how boring it is, telling the reader by page 190 or so that he would be surprised if anybody made it that far. Well I did. And I've come back alive to tell you it's not worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary translation
Review: Perec lost his mother in the Holocaust. A Void is precisely about the difficulty of speaking in the absence of the most necessary thing. Not merely an intellectual tour de force -- although certainly that -- but one of the most subtle things ever written on grief.

Rating:
Summary: Highly good book, ya
Review: Six plus six plus four months ago, I bought a book: A Void. Originally, an author (G. P*r*c) first thought of A Void (or La Disparition) in 1967. In 1994, it was brought out from a country at a north Atlantic location in which Français is usually a normal way of articulating in writing and out loud and into a form of communication which most inhabitants of this country (US of A) know. This translator was a Mr. Adair. This book is a highly fantastic book. A linguistic madman who thought it up was choosing to put A Void on papyrus without a symbol in a form of communication, this missing fifth symbol. This author, or madman, was brilliant and did it without any faults, as did translator Adair. Why? I don't know. Author was crazy as a fox is crazy.
In this book, this Void, I found no lack of things for stimulation of my mind. In fact, Void is not a void at all. Pagination # 104:
`Twas upon a midnight tristful, I sat poring, wan and wistful
Through many a quant and curious listful of my consorts slain.
"Aha!" you shout out (not vocalizing too loudly, I wish), "that's a translation of an 18-stanza rhyming story by--"
But I cannot put to papyrus what you shout. I can, though, say that A Void lists author of rhyming as "Arthur Gordon Pym," thus naming a man from a work that this actual author did not finish. (Two or 3 of a group would say this man was too full of phobia at his own construction, à la an individual of physics, biology, and so on, in Mary's horror story about a monstrous guy known as Frank in a common-drinking-glass [I ask your pardon for this bad pun].) That rhyming is uno of many mind-stimulating "yummy things" you'll find in this book, which riffs on such works as Moby Dick, Milton's "Utopia" Lost, "Bill Bard's" Danish King Jr., and many classic puzzling/frightful works.
Only complaint: whodunit halts, stops at finish: author can't hold on to organizing thoughts to make whodunit work.
In conclusion: look at this book.

Rating:
Summary: By G*org*s, '*'s Got It!
Review: Whatever happened to the French novel? There was the immediate postwar era, when once could read Camus, Sartre's post-"Nausea" novels, the rise of Jean Genet. But in the fifties and sixties, the "nouveau roman" developed, which in the hands of Robbe-Gillet, Sarraute and Butor, sought to deconstruct the possibilities of fictions, and which in the hands of such writers as Robbe-Gillet, Sarraute, and Butor. The result was very complex and subtle and elaborate, with much on the ontological significance of the novel. But it was not the sort of fiction that people liked to read, and it left most English speaking critics very cold. The late Georges Perec was connected to this sort of school, and at least one intelligent English critic has thought that Perec wrote some of the most boring novels of the twentieth century. This book, however, is manifestly not one of them. Indeed it's a remarkable hoot, at times quite funny, and throughout consistently ingenious and clever. What Perec has written is a lipogram, a book which follows a special grammatical rule. In this case there are no "e"s in the entire work. Writing such a book is incredibly difficult, and translating it into another language would appear to be impossible. Fortunately this is not the case, as Gilbert Adair has demonstrably shown. There has been at least one lipogram in English that includes no e, and the unimaginative writer, when he wished to have his characters talk, only used "said." Adair, rather helpfully, prefers to use the present tense. Certain words in French, such as "juif", "mort" and "Amour" have to be replaced with unusual English equivalents.

The result is an incredibly strange novel. At times the sentences are full of proper nouns that exist for no purpose than their e-less nature. At other times the necessary twists and turns are odd and unusual, and the result feels like you are reading a book of palindromes. (Another Perec specialty, and he wrote the longest ever, 5,000 words long). But more often there are brilliant flights of baroque fancy, such as the dinner Augustus Clifford prepares for his unfortunate guests on p. 115. The plot starts with France in chaos, and an insomniac critic Anton Vowl, who goes missing. His friends find strange notes and letters. They find his lipogramatic versions of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," Shelley's "Ozymandias," and Vowl's version of the most famous soliliquoy in English ("Living or not Living: that is what I ask). But gradually a plot begins to develop, in a way worthy of "A Manuscript found in Saragossa."

Can Vowl's friends find out who or what is behind the strange deaths and disappearances? Who stabbed an Arab solicitor who smoked a cigar in a zoo, and then absconded with his corpse? What is the secret of the strange ruby-like zahir that brings death to those who mention it? What secret does a carp named Jonah carry within himself? Why does Clifford's son, Douglas Haig, die a horrible death while dressed as the murdered father in Mozart's "Don Giovanni?" Why is one of the chapters missing? There is an especially vicious Albanian brigand who who we learn, long after his death, has been particularly humiliated, along with the lust of his life. But there are important moral lessons as well. The novel agrees with Jefferson and Danton that primogeniture is a really, really bad idea. Also, there are certain perversions that one should never undertake, especially when your brother is trying to dynamite you. And why is the French title of the work the same as the certificates the Vichy regime gave to those inquiring about those deported to Auchwitz, one of those being Perec's mother? There are strange secret baths, the most incredible revelations, the oddest connections between the characters are revealed, and wealthy Ottomans who are turned into peanut butter sundaes. There is deliberate anachronism and the solution is not entirely coherent. But be aware that the villian is not among the characters who in the course of the novel attempt or succeed at murder and manslaughter. As a novel, "A Void" is not at the height of Calvino and Garcia Marquez, who provide love, compassion and hope to their magical games. But this is a better novel than "Pale Fire" and comparable to Borges and Pavic, a Faberge Egg novel in which something nasty ticks.

Rating:
Summary: By G*org*s, '*'s Got It!
Review: Whatever happened to the French novel? There was the immediate postwar era, when once could read Camus, Sartre's post-"Nausea" novels, the rise of Jean Genet. But in the fifties and sixties, the "nouveau roman" developed, which in the hands of Robbe-Gillet, Sarraute and Butor, sought to deconstruct the possibilities of fictions, and which in the hands of such writers as Robbe-Gillet, Sarraute, and Butor. The result was very complex and subtle and elaborate, with much on the ontological significance of the novel. But it was not the sort of fiction that people liked to read, and it left most English speaking critics very cold. The late Georges Perec was connected to this sort of school, and at least one intelligent English critic has thought that Perec wrote some of the most boring novels of the twentieth century. This book, however, is manifestly not one of them. Indeed it's a remarkable hoot, at times quite funny, and throughout consistently ingenious and clever. What Perec has written is a lipogram, a book which follows a special grammatical rule. In this case there are no "e"s in the entire work. Writing such a book is incredibly difficult, and translating it into another language would appear to be impossible. Fortunately this is not the case, as Gilbert Adair has demonstrably shown. There has been at least one lipogram in English that includes no e, and the unimaginative writer, when he wished to have his characters talk, only used "said." Adair, rather helpfully, prefers to use the present tense. Certain words in French, such as "juif", "mort" and "Amour" have to be replaced with unusual English equivalents.

The result is an incredibly strange novel. At times the sentences are full of proper nouns that exist for no purpose than their e-less nature. At other times the necessary twists and turns are odd and unusual, and the result feels like you are reading a book of palindromes. (Another Perec specialty, and he wrote the longest ever, 5,000 words long). But more often there are brilliant flights of baroque fancy, such as the dinner Augustus Clifford prepares for his unfortunate guests on p. 115. The plot starts with France in chaos, and an insomniac critic Anton Vowl, who goes missing. His friends find strange notes and letters. They find his lipogramatic versions of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," Shelley's "Ozymandias," and Vowl's version of the most famous soliliquoy in English ("Living or not Living: that is what I ask). But gradually a plot begins to develop, in a way worthy of "A Manuscript found in Saragossa."

Can Vowl's friends find out who or what is behind the strange deaths and disappearances? Who stabbed an Arab solicitor who smoked a cigar in a zoo, and then absconded with his corpse? What is the secret of the strange ruby-like zahir that brings death to those who mention it? What secret does a carp named Jonah carry within himself? Why does Clifford's son, Douglas Haig, die a horrible death while dressed as the murdered father in Mozart's "Don Giovanni?" Why is one of the chapters missing? There is an especially vicious Albanian brigand who who we learn, long after his death, has been particularly humiliated, along with the lust of his life. But there are important moral lessons as well. The novel agrees with Jefferson and Danton that primogeniture is a really, really bad idea. Also, there are certain perversions that one should never undertake, especially when your brother is trying to dynamite you. And why is the French title of the work the same as the certificates the Vichy regime gave to those inquiring about those deported to Auchwitz, one of those being Perec's mother? There are strange secret baths, the most incredible revelations, the oddest connections between the characters are revealed, and wealthy Ottomans who are turned into peanut butter sundaes. There is deliberate anachronism and the solution is not entirely coherent. But be aware that the villian is not among the characters who in the course of the novel attempt or succeed at murder and manslaughter. As a novel, "A Void" is not at the height of Calvino and Garcia Marquez, who provide love, compassion and hope to their magical games. But this is a better novel than "Pale Fire" and comparable to Borges and Pavic, a Faberge Egg novel in which something nasty ticks.