I don't think any of the thirteen-odd reviews on the page for the hardcover edition really do the work justice. (Incidentally: Amazon should do something about the way reviews have to attach themselves to hardcover or paperback: there isn't usually any difference between the two, and it divides the critical discussions.)
People are struck at the amazing idea of writing a book without the letter "e," and also at the accomplishment of the translator at finding reasonable equivalents for so many of Perec's solutions.
But that's just praising virtuosity: if the book is as important as some of his other books, there has to be another effect of his choice. Perec is, I think, one of the most interesting postwar writers. "Life: A User's Guide" is tremendous, and "W" is entirely different and equally astonishing. But "A Void" is experimental in a different sense.
Perec himself helpfully gives the reasons for his experiment in the penultimate section of the book. He says (1) the book might be a "stimulant... on fiction-writing today," (2) that it would be "a spur to [the] imagination," (3) that it might be a "wilfully critical" provocation "vis-a-vis fiction." For an ideal reader, then, this book is a model of the kind of radical strategy that has to be adopted to make the novel a viable form.
I have no criticism of that ambition. Raymond Roussel's "Locus Solus" is a deep well here -- it is alluded to throughout the book -- and I completely agree that much in Roussel remains unmined. The difficulty, for me, is in the exact ways that the strategy of avoiding the letter "e" plays out in individual passages. In order for the book to operate as Perec hoped, the avoidance of "e's" would have to present itself as a continuous negotiation, providing variable but continuous pressure on ordinary narration. The void would have an abstract effect, turning the reader's thoughts to questions of what comprises ordinary narration and what might be done to overturn it.
What actually happens is quite different. The overall narrative is very well arranged so that the "e" itself, its persistent and almost always unnoticed absence from the lives of the characters, is what produces their deaths. But at the level of sentences, phrases, and word choices, the void is often more annoying and repetitive than enabling. Here is an example:
"Miraculously, though, Albin got out of Tirana by night and, hiding out in a thick, dark, almost fairy-tale wood, would languish in it for all of six springs and six autumns, a half-moribund survivor..." (p. 159)
The phrase, "half-moribund survivor," is a substitute for "half-dead." The book is replete with examples of complex, Latinate words substituting for simpler, Anglo-Saxon words. The result is a quirky and often pleasing archaism and formality.
But it's different with "all of six spring and six autumns." The book is also replete with versions of that phrase -- "20 springs," "six springs," and so on. All those are to avoid the word "years." Now that's not a problem in French, where the word would be "ans," but it is typical of the book as a whole. It's a silly, uninteresting, repetition. My point here is that it's a different kind of effect than the first one.
It's different again with "fairy-story wood," which is a substitute for "fairy-tale wood." That is not archaic or expressive, but random. If it has an expressive value, it's just the very fleeting annoyance I feel at realizing what generated the expression.
These different kinds of problems create different expressive effects, and remind readers of different kinds of writing (Latinate, scholarly, gruff, inept, childish...). In combination -- relentless combination! -- they make this book into an experiment in hokey, inept writing.
You might think all that is intended, but I do not think so. In the penultimate section, Perec says his experiment took him down "many intriguing linguistic highways and byways," and that he honed his "writing skills" with "inspiration" and "not without occasional humor." My sense is that he experienced his experiment as a delightful diversion, requiring all sorts of clevernesses. My experience reading the book does not correspond to that. My interest in his virtuosity, and his translator's virtuosity, wore off in the first fifty pages after their infelicities and awkwardnesses began to outweigh the obstacles I could see they had overcome: and my patient wore out another hundred pages later, when I began to see that the author and translator did not experience the many kinds of infelicities as irregular annoyances rather than enabling reworkings of fiction.
Read "Life: A User's Guide" instead: it is a masterpiece -- to some degree precisely because it avoids the unevennesses of intention and expression, and retains all the strangeness, all the virtuosity, and all the astonishing innovation.
