A mind-bending novel from the author of Life A User's Manual
A Void is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit,
chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of
displays Georges Perec's virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an
outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the
letter E.
The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political
anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing.
Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to
his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's
penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in
which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends
work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads
discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and
under the most mysterious circumstances . . .
A book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, Time magazine
called
A Void, "...an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."