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Title: A Void by Georges Perec, Gilbert Adair ISBN: 0-00-271119-2 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: January, 1995 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $52.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.31 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An odd and painful quandry, but truly amazing.
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: purely intellectual exercize of a brilliant mind
Comment: The book looks more like a proof of a concept (writing a novel without a single E) than anything else. Georges Perec was also fond of creating rebuses and crossword puzzles, and this book looks like one of those. It gives no more emotional pleasure than solving crossword in the morning newspaper, although one can be proud if the crossword was difficult. Well, this one probably was, but there is nothing more than a coldy executed technique of a brilliant author. One crucial ingredient - heart - appears to be missing, not just a certain vowel. The book can be admired, but liked? Probably, not...
Rating: 5
Summary: By G*org*s, '*'s Got It!
Comment: 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.
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Title: Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, David Bellos ISBN: 0879237511 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title:The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) ASIN: B00009TB5G Publisher: New Line Home Entertainment Pub. Date: 18 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $25.99 |
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