George, I’m happy to see that you could come up for air and share your experience with A Void (what work were you a-voiding?).   No, I am not surprised — indeed, as I was writing this post, I thought: “Naturally, George [Wallace] has already read this book.”  I just pointed to your excellent Comment in an update to this post.  Do comment more often.
If you could find the time, we would all love an e-less double dactyl from you.

George, I’m happy to see that you could come up for air and share your experience with A Void (what work were you a-voiding?).   No, I am not surprised — indeed, as I was writing this post, I thought: “Naturally, George [Wallace] has already read this book.”  I just pointed to your excellent Comment in an update to this post.  Do comment more often.
If you could find the time, we would all love an e-less double dactyl from you.

David,

You will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that I have actually read A Void. That M. Perec and Mr. Adair could manage in effect to write the same book in two different “e”-centric languages without once letting the forbidden vowel slip in is a thing of amazement. Adair deserves a particular hat tip, since his task in translation was perhaps harder than was Perec’s in writing the novel in the first place: Adair had not only to avoid the letter “e” but also to adhere as closely as he was able to Perec’s original in terms of plot and dialogue.

One of the book’s conceits, at least in English, is that characters are progressively killed off, each one disappearing just as he or she is on the verge of uttering a word that must unavoidably include an “e” or of actualy mentioning the letter by name. [I'm giving nothing away in making that disclosure.] More than just a clever party trick, A Void boasts a surprisingly complicated plot and a quantity of heavy French metaphysics, and would be worth a read even without its ostentatious banishment of that useful letter.

David,

You will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that I have actually read A Void. That M. Perec and Mr. Adair could manage in effect to write the same book in two different “e”-centric languages without once letting the forbidden vowel slip in is a thing of amazement. Adair deserves a particular hat tip, since his task in translation was perhaps harder than was Perec’s in writing the novel in the first place: Adair had not only to avoid the letter “e” but also to adhere as closely as he was able to Perec’s original in terms of plot and dialogue.

One of the book’s conceits, at least in English, is that characters are progressively killed off, each one disappearing just as he or she is on the verge of uttering a word that must unavoidably include an “e” or of actualy mentioning the letter by name. [I'm giving nothing away in making that disclosure.] More than just a clever party trick, A Void boasts a surprisingly complicated plot and a quantity of heavy French metaphysics, and would be worth a read even without its ostentatious banishment of that useful letter.