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GB: It's a conspiracy story. You'd probably have noticed, as the English cover has a big E with one of those "no" signs over it.
Basically, Perec was a word geek:
Perec was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), a Paris-based group of writers founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François LeLionnais. Other well-known members were the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American Harry Matthews. OuLiPo tries to expand literature by borrowing formal patterns from such other domains as mathematics, Logic or chess. Perec's own books range from novels to collections of crossword puzzles, from essays to parodies, from poetry to wordgames.
Perec was fascinated by palindromes, which are words or entire sentences that, when spelled backwards, still read the same: Live Devil or See, slave, I demonstrate yet arts no medieval sees. Perec created what is possibly the longest palindrome ever written, "ça ne va pas san dire," made up from more than five thousand words.
Palindromes, anagrams, wordplays and word games are ever-present in most of what Perec wrote. Another tour-de-force of his was a 466-word text where the only vowel allowed was A. He wrote that short-short story in French, although its title is in English: "What a Man!" It is the story of two characters: Andras MacAdam, e Armand d'Artagnan. Perec's fascination with vowels made him a master of the lipogram. Lipograms are texts in which one of more letters are not allowed to appear; thus, "a lipogram in Z" is any text in which that letter is absent. The text of the present paragraph, for example, may be considered a lipogram in the letter that stays between "J" and "L" (all other letters are featured in it). Raymond Queneau mentions lipograms composed by classical poets such as Pindar and Lope de Vega.
...some of the games they play seem like they'd go down well around here. Boundary-pushing, etc. Excerpt of the book here. |
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