This book's original
author is an
OuLiPo luminary, part of that group who try to find
amusing juxtapositions in
scribal oddity,
combinatorial profusion, or
arcana holding back ways of putting
fictional works into a unity from
multitudinous parts.
With La Disparition, or in Mr Adair's happy anglicisation A Void, nothing dubious irks us about that important lipogrammatic plank of his task, for it's London to a brick that if you work at it hard you can continually churn out such word-play, admitting only a nagging conscious worry that our first draft is stylistically odd. To talk frankly, our linguistic job isn't as jolly baffling as it might first look. Important though a particular sign of our script is, occurring in many a foundational word of grammar, it's not in truth such a stumbling block to knowability if you find it missing.
Significantly up in that stratum of how it can hit us on glancing through it is an atavistic thirst for a plot that hangs as a unity, and I'm afraid much though I found A Void (I only know it in Adair's translation: would this bias my approach? Hard to say) an amusing occupation for calm hours and odd bits of your day, watching how that poor brain-racking author might squirm to latch onto a smooth circumlocution lacking that magic sound; for all that, its plot is clunky, its population of imaginary folk do not lift my spirits with anticipation of what will occur upon our forthcoming conjunction in this story. I'm sorry, but it just don't work out right, guv!
A final conclusion:
Let me be free, these Perec texts seem sweet, even when they never get better, never even deeper. He keeps me replete, he lets me see the clever wheels he breeds. We enter, seek the depth, pester the text... mleh.