A Void

Winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation A mind-bending mysterious comedy from the author of Life A User’s Manual. A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of displays Georges Perec’s virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl’s penchant for word games, especially for “lipograms,” compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl’s verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . . A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, The New York Times called A Void, “a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped.” Praise for A Void “A Void is a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped. It's a novel about voids, accidental and murderous, about body snatching and snatching 40 winks, about abduction and seduction. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a detective novel or at least a whodunit, with this twist: E done it, but we mustn't ever say that. We can't. When the characters get close to E, they get written out of the plot (maimed, shredded, fed to carp)….I think anybody who gives this a try will roar along with it.” —New York Times “…A verbal circus with sideshows featuring ancient languages, varying ways of communication, and prankster existentialism, all of which are of head-shaking genius. A mind-blowing feat of writing and translation.” —Kirkus “Perec sets out his game as a mock mystery; or perhaps I should say, as the performance of a mystery in which players and author occasionally drop their comic masks to reveal grief and horror, but only for a split second and with the sinister elusiveness of a subliminal message. Anton Vowl, a writer, disappears; his friends search for him and are killed off one by one. Each death occurs just where the character is on the point of enunciating the mystery or ‘damnation’ that has them all in its grip—just as they are about to speak a word containing the letter E. There is a joyful comedy to the game. The characters, helpless in the lexicographic fate that their author has devised, are not much unlike ourselves, submitted to the fates that write us while we are trying to write them.” —Los Angeles Times “An absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss.” —Time “That Perec also seems to have been temperamentally allergic to the stultifying uniformity of market culture and branding, which tends to reduce the particularities of experience to manageable (and profitable) generalities, makes him central to our own time. Each of his books is a jarring surprise, irreducibly idiosyncratic and autonomous, and whoever decides to read him will come away not only with a new sense of what is possible in literature, but of how strange and exciting, and how fun, real originality can be.”—The New Yorker