I can't imagine writing an entire novel without using "the." Amazing. The most famous and ambitious lipogrammatic novel (and one of the most difficult books I've ever read) is Georges Perec's La Disparition (equally brilliant, lipogrammatic English translation: A Void, by Gilbert Adair). Highly stimulating reading. Keep an unabridged dictionary very close by. Incredible! Another recent example is Eunoia by Christian Bök in which each chapter is missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain the letters A, E, I or U. A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel is called univocalic (McArthur, 1992). The eponymous cycle of poems from Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing) by Canadian poet Mike Schertzer was created "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The 4 vowels <a e i o> and 11 consonants <... No problem. I think it's fascinating, too! A few years ago, feeling especially ambitious and inspired by Perec, I considered writing my own lipogrammatic work. Doing some online research on the subject (the web seemed so much smaller back then!) I ended up running into Christian Bök's website and was awed by his creativity. I ended up trading a few emails with him about his work. I haven't kept up with him lately, but he was a sharp, adventurous writer and I loved the way he embraced self-imposed restrictions. Thanks for the memories, Mousie! Kore7, did you ever end up writing it? I feel my life experience is limited enough without imposing more limits on my writing. haha. I might be able to work out a poem though. Negative on that, mousie, though I did try out a few paragraphs for fun. It is really, really demanding work to make your writing appear full and effortless under such harsh restrictions. But I haven't given up. Here's to the future.... Wow, awesome find! |
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