A Void

A Void is a postmodern novel written by French author Georges Perec that was originally published in French as La Disparition (“The Vanishing”) in 1969. It was masterfully translated into English as A Void by Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair in 1994.

Perec’s extended lipogram—a literary exercise that involves writing without a given letter of the alphabet—adds a layer of self-reflexivity to a novel that does nothing but point (obliquely) to what is missing. Writing without the letter “e” requires mastering avoidance techniques, and here Perec proves himself a virtuoso, mobilizing the often forgotten resources of the French language so as to inscribe within it a new “e”-less idiom. But Perec’s novel is more than an elaborate linguistic game. It is proof that it is possible to do without the letter “e,” a demonstration that affirms the expressive possibilities of language. Adair’s translation also only uses words that do not contain the letter “e.”

The plot parodies both noir detective fiction and horror fiction. The introduction posits that France is rudderless and in crisis. The story then introduces Anton Vowl, a man obsessed with discovering something that he feels is missing from his life. Soon, Vowl himself disappears, and a growing group of friends and police officials work to find out what has happened. When one person involved suddenly dies after reading a poem, it is revealed that there is a family curse and that almost all the characters in the novel are, unknown to themselves and each other, members of the cursed family. The reading of a manuscript that lacks the letter “e” turns out to be instantly fatal to these family members, who are also subject to a family tradition that only the firstborn member of a generation can be permitted to live. The novel ends with the murderer as the only survivor.

The missing letter is the clue not only to the genesis of the novel, but also to the plot’s series of disappearances. The forbidden “e” turns out to be a kind of malediction, an invisible bodily mark that condemns the characters, one by one, to death. An exercise in style brilliantly executed, this is a ludic detective fiction in which the key to the mystery is visible everywhere and nowhere.