A Void [Hardcover]

Georges Perec (Author), Gilbert Adair (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1995

As his country is torn apart by social and political anarchy, Anton Vowl, a chronic insomniac, disappears. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any indication, for any faint hint, as to his location.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

OuLiPians (members of Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) once defined themselves as rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape. Perec's labyrinth in La Disparition was a lipogram omitting the letter "e." Lipograms are an old device, but what makes Perec's effort unique is the length and the fact that, despite its experimental nature, this works as a fun book, a sort of spoof on detective fiction. When the troubled Anton Vowl mysteriously disappears, his friends, led by Amaury Conson, try to find clues. Gathered at the great house of Azincourt, they uncover forbidden passions, an ancient curse, unsuspected relationships and an unending supply of dead bodies. Amaury's search for Anton is a premise: the reader's real conundrum is untangling the logogriph of A Void's multiple hints and references. Some are numerical/alphabetical (there is no chapter five out of 26); some require knowledge of French and other literature (one lipogram without "a"s or "e"s is by fellow OuLiPian Raymond Queneau); others are simply amusing ("An amorphous mass of books and authors bombards his brain... La Disparition? Or Adair's translation of it?") In A Void, Adair has proved himself an adept translator, one fully as comfortable with Perec's sense of absurd fun as with his language.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: Harvill; First Edition edition (January 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0002711192
• ISBN-13: 978-0002711197
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #507,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly good book, ya, September 3, 2001

By 

Greg (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Void (Hardcover)

Six plus six plus four months ago, I bought a book: A Void. Originally, an author (G. P*r*c) first thought of A Void (or La Disparition) in 1967. In 1994, it was brought out from a country at a north Atlantic location in which Français is usually a normal way of articulating in writing and out loud and into a form of communication which most inhabitants of this country (US of A) know. This translator was a Mr. Adair. This book is a highly fantastic book. A linguistic madman who thought it up was choosing to put A Void on papyrus without a symbol in a form of communication, this missing fifth symbol. This author, or madman, was brilliant and did it without any faults, as did translator Adair. Why? I don't know. Author was crazy as a fox is crazy.
In this book, this Void, I found no lack of things for stimulation of my mind. In fact, Void is not a void at all. Pagination # 104:
`Twas upon a midnight tristful, I sat poring, wan and wistful
Through many a quant and curious listful of my consorts slain.
"Aha!" you shout out (not vocalizing too loudly, I wish), "that's a translation of an 18-stanza rhyming story by--"
But I cannot put to papyrus what you shout. I can, though, say that A Void lists author of rhyming as "Arthur Gordon Pym," thus naming a man from a work that this actual author did not finish. (Two or 3 of a group would say this man was too full of phobia at his own construction, à la an individual of physics, biology, and so on, in Mary's horror story about a monstrous guy known as Frank in a common-drinking-glass [I ask your pardon for this bad pun].) That rhyming is uno of many mind-stimulating "yummy things" you'll find in this book, which riffs on such works as Moby Dick, Milton's "Utopia" Lost, "Bill Bard's" Danish King Jr., and many classic puzzling/frightful works.
Only complaint: whodunit halts, stops at finish: author can't hold on to organizing thoughts to make whodunit work.
In conclusion: look at this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant Who-Dun-It about all of us., September 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Void (Hardcover)

Won't try to keep up the non-e business here :) I have no idea why anyone finds this book tedious. It has a killer, loopy, murder mystery plot, but also manages to be a deeply felt meditation on absence and the way absences constitute our lives. Lots in common with Derrida, etc. The translation is a work of genius/insanity. I can't imagine a better job being done.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Justify my lipogram, March 2, 1998

By 

Rachel Chalmers ([e-mail]) (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A void. (Paperback)

Perec lost his mother in the Holocaust. A Void is precisely about the difficulty of speaking in the absence of the most necessary thing. Not merely an intellectual tour de force -- although certainly that -- but one of the most subtle things ever written on grief.