A Void

A Void plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story's constraint risk fatal injury. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words, said: "This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown." ==Major themes==

Georges Perec's direct kin passed away in World War II: his father as a GI, his mother in the Holocaust. Perec was brought up by his aunt and uncle after serving in the war as a parachutist. Warren Motte finds the lack of any e in the book as a stand-in for Perec's own notion of loss and spiritual limbo: ==Translations==

It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void, for which he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1995. The Adair translation of the book also won the 1996 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Fiction. Various English translations are titled A Vanishing by Ian Monk, ''Vanish'd! by John Lee, and Omissions'' by Julian West. All translators have asked that the text follow the lipogrammatic constraint of the original work, avoiding the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. This precludes the use of words normally considered crucial such as ("I"), ("and"), and (masculine "the") in French, as well as "me", "be", and "the" in English. The Spanish version contains no a, which is the second most common suffix in the Spanish language (first being e), while the Russian version contains no о. In Japan, "A Void" contains no syllables with the sound "i" (, , , etc.) at all. ==Versions==

• • • • • • • • • • ==See also==