La Disparition

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Maxime Decout , La Disparition: un roman de l’herméneutique, in La Disparition, 1969-2019: un demi-siècle de lectures, Cahiers Georges Perec, vol.13, Bordeaux, Le Castor astral, 2019, p. 41. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e"). Is it just playing with words? (At which you can only groan?) A silly distraction of and by an author? Or just a frolic of his own?

Six ans après La Disparition, Perec publie W ou le souvenir d'enfance, précédé d'une dédicace: «Pour E». He’ll just break the grammar and spelling rules: e.g. l’oisir instead of l e loisir (“leisure”) @ p261; m’uicidant instead of m e suicidant (“killing myself”) @p277.Yet I think it needs to be said that what happens in reading is quite different from what's implied by the book's critical reception or by the injunction not to read expressively (for "style"). The overall narrative is very cleverly arranged so that the persistent and almost always unnoticed absence of the letter "e" 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, using Adair's English translation:

Hans Hartje, Cherchez l'intrus: l’Élu dans La Disparition, in Figures de l'exclu. Actes du colloque international de littérature comparée, Université de Saint Étienne. 1999.The novel is a tour de force of skill in vocabulary and grammatical manipulation. The chief difficulties are: Deux intrigues semblent entremêlées: une histoire de vengeance, de meurtres et de crimes dont il faut rechercher le coupable, mais aussi les effets parfois fatals de la disparition de la lettre e. Par une telle disposition, La Disparition se présente comme un double roman policier. Cette mise en forme permet d'introduire le dispositif lipogrammatique dans l’intrigue, non seulement par la disparition des personnages, mais aussi en métamorphosant radicalement la lecture en investigation [6 ]. a curious anomaly distinguishing it from outwardly similar narrations...still ignorant of that conundrum that sustains its propagation...a work in which an author's imagination runs so wild, in which his writing is so stylistically outlandish, his plotting so absurd, of an inspiration so capricious and inconstant, so gratuitous and instinctual, you'd think his brain was going soft." (Pardon my indulging in a long but singularly apt quotation from this author.)