I Read The Longest Lipograms So You Don't Have To (4 of 4)
...but these few, you really should.
Impersonations by Mark Zimmerman.
Story: A set of biographical poems.
Lipogram: Each poem uses only the letters in the subject’s name.
Why a Lipogram?: These are name-based experimental poems, like higgledy-piggledys.
My Take: There's a kind of music to be found in these limited letter ranges and how they all echo the name of the person they’re referring to. It’s fun. I don’t have much to say about this one. It just really works for me!
Eunoia by Christian Bök.
Story: Five poetic tales that each begin by expressing the difficulty of writing, then move into sprawling renditions of war, politics, sex, violence, food, and death.
Lipogram: Each story uses only one of the main five vowels. Y is excluded from the entire work. (After the main part, there are additional constraied poems, including a couple of lipograms: one additional E-only lipogram and one that uses only the letters in v-o-w-e-l-s.)
Why a Lipogram?: Bök is testing language’s ability to render the great, primal themes of life. What would’ve been tiresome if he’d used every word he knew becomes focused through the lens of his tight constraint.
My Take: Bök showers us with a surprisingly rich and varied vocabulary, getting a hypnotic beauty out of it all. In the afterword, he claims the finished work used about 98% of all monovocalic words on his list, and I believe it! Like a hip-hop song that just pours on the rhymes, the constant presence of one vowel gives the stories music on a level you wouldn’t think possible. And the stories cover many of the great themes of the human condition, to boot. What’s not to love?
A Void by Georges Perec (translated by Richard Adair, originally La disparition).
Story: Anton Vowl is tormented by the idea that something is missing in the world. When he disappears, his friends gather to hunt for clues to his end…but the closer they get to the truth, the more the mysterious absence haunts them as well. Eventually, they realize what’s missing—but spelling it out could spell their doom.
Lipogram: No e.
Why a Lipogram?: The absence of an e is the “villain” of the story, and it works as a strange metaphor for other little-spoken absences. Perec, who was orphaned by World War II and the Holocaust, had a certain sense of those absences. They were felt keenly in his native France in the 1960s, where this story is set. They may resonate today with other people confronting more modern prejudice, who worry that they too might be erased.
That probably makes the story sound more serious than it is. Like Perec’s other lipogram The Exeter Texts, this is mostly fun with language at play. But it’s so much better than The Exeter Texts, and it’s that little tinge of darkness that seems to make the difference.
My Take: A wild, delightful parody of a detective story with just enough supernatural horror to give it spice. Even if it weren’t the longest lipogram ever published, this book would still be a joy.
La disparition has three additional English translations and editions in thirteen other languages (it got into Polish just last year). All of them are also lipograms. There’s even a Japanese lipogram, precluding any katakana that has an “I” sound. It’s not in development as a movie, as far as I know. But it should be!
