A Void, by Georges Perec
A Void, by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair
"So why that odd postscript?"
"I thought at first it was a phony. My hunch, now, is that it was his only option. Anton had to go out on a full stop, so to say. Possibly, his wish was to transmit a signal to us that wasn't so ambiguous, but, not having such a pithy communication at his disposal...
"Nothing is as cryptic as a void," murmurs Amaury.
I don't normally acknowledge the translator of a foreign language book I read, but Gilbert Adair is my new hero. I didn't read Perec's book so much as Adair's. The English translation, not attempted until 25 years after the 1969 original French, is remarkable not because it's a pleasure to read (it isn't), or because it's smooth enough to not look like a translation (it isn't, although I suspect it has this in common with the original), but because it was done at all. Which is true of the original.
Georges Perec wrote a 300 book without ever using the letter E.
Seriously. That's the whole point of the book. No Es. If that intrigues you and is your idea of a good read, have at it. If it makes you back away slowly, you're free to do that.
Perec postured as a demented genius. You can tell by the way he chose to pose for his author photo on the book, grinning out at us with bug-eyes and feral hair. He apparently loved wordplay, had oodles of time on his hands, and made a point of tackling every literary genre and technique once, without ever doing anything twice. A Void, while being clunky and incoherent as a matter of course, is nominally a political thriller. A conspiracy nut named Anton Vowl (get it?) suddenly goes missing (get it?), leaving "a void" (just like the letter Perec tries to "avoid" in the book). Vowl's worried friends search for him, and begin to comb through his diary, looking for clues as to where he may be (Stop, Georges, you're killing me!).
Get it? Get it? How very clever Perec is! His cleverness either has you enthralled or begging him to stop.
But wait, there's more! Inside the diary are mangled E-less rewritten famous quotations, such as "William Shakspar's 'to go on living or not to go on living' stanzas", or the complete poem attributed to "Arthur Gordon Pym", about a blackbird who says "Not again". Which Perec mis-translated from English to French without Es, and Adair translated into English again, without Es in the English--and he kept the meter constant! Do you see why I admire Adair so much, even though the book sucks?
It's like one of those recurring Saturday Night Live characters that some Hollywood idiot milks into a full-length movie although it can barely sustain a ten minute comedy sketch. It's like some agonizing physical skill that is neither entertaining nor useful, like mastering the art of not blinking for over 20 minutes at a time. I mean, maybe you could win a bet with that, but that's it. No matter how clever you are, there is no way around having to expand little words like "me" and "be" and "the" into clunky three-word phrases each and every time. Sure, the feat was all the more impressive for having continued through 300 pages, but he should have been content with proving he could do it with a short story, that might at least have had a coherent plot.
"So why that odd postscript?"
"I thought at first it was a phony. My hunch, now, is that it was his only option. Anton had to go out on a full stop, so to say. Possibly, his wish was to transmit a signal to us that wasn't so ambiguous, but, not having such a pithy communication at his disposal...
"Nothing is as cryptic as a void," murmurs Amaury.
I don't normally acknowledge the translator of a foreign language book I read, but Gilbert Adair is my new hero. I didn't read Perec's book so much as Adair's. The English translation, not attempted until 25 years after the 1969 original French, is remarkable not because it's a pleasure to read (it isn't), or because it's smooth enough to not look like a translation (it isn't, although I suspect it has this in common with the original), but because it was done at all. Which is true of the original.
Georges Perec wrote a 300 book without ever using the letter E.
Seriously. That's the whole point of the book. No Es. If that intrigues you and is your idea of a good read, have at it. If it makes you back away slowly, you're free to do that.
Perec postured as a demented genius. You can tell by the way he chose to pose for his author photo on the book, grinning out at us with bug-eyes and feral hair. He apparently loved wordplay, had oodles of time on his hands, and made a point of tackling every literary genre and technique once, without ever doing anything twice. A Void, while being clunky and incoherent as a matter of course, is nominally a political thriller. A conspiracy nut named Anton Vowl (get it?) suddenly goes missing (get it?), leaving "a void" (just like the letter Perec tries to "avoid" in the book). Vowl's worried friends search for him, and begin to comb through his diary, looking for clues as to where he may be (Stop, Georges, you're killing me!).
Get it? Get it? How very clever Perec is! His cleverness either has you enthralled or begging him to stop.
But wait, there's more! Inside the diary are mangled E-less rewritten famous quotations, such as "William Shakspar's 'to go on living or not to go on living' stanzas", or the complete poem attributed to "Arthur Gordon Pym", about a blackbird who says "Not again". Which Perec mis-translated from English to French without Es, and Adair translated into English again, without Es in the English--and he kept the meter constant! Do you see why I admire Adair so much, even though the book sucks?
It's like one of those recurring Saturday Night Live characters that some Hollywood idiot milks into a full-length movie although it can barely sustain a ten minute comedy sketch. It's like some agonizing physical skill that is neither entertaining nor useful, like mastering the art of not blinking for over 20 minutes at a time. I mean, maybe you could win a bet with that, but that's it. No matter how clever you are, there is no way around having to expand little words like "me" and "be" and "the" into clunky three-word phrases each and every time. Sure, the feat was all the more impressive for having continued through 300 pages, but he should have been content with proving he could do it with a short story, that might at least have had a coherent plot.