Word: lipogram
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AVOID, ORIGINALLY LA DISPARITION (1969), is a lipogram, an old trick dating as far back as 500 B.C. in which authors voluntarily submit to awful handicaps, arbitrarily abjuring crucial signs or symbols and making writing, always a hard task, a virtual impossibility. In A Void, this onus is particularly harsh. All consonants, from stalwart b to languishing z, can occur in normal fashion; but only a, i, o and u may fill out what is ordinarily a quorum of 26. "Huh?" you may gasp, "no ...?" Shhhh! Do not think or, God forbid, say it, at any cost...
...paved with rolling stones." Poet Jacques Bens writes "irrational sonnets" based on the value of pi carried to the fourth decimal place: 3.1415. The 14 lines are divided into groups containing three, one, four, one and five lines-in that order. Perec's greatest verbalistic missile is a lipogram-a composition that completely omits one letter of the alphabet. There is not a single e in his highly praised novel, La Disparition-an omission that some critics failed to notice. "There were no problems of inspiration," recalls Perec. "After a while, the letters of the alphabet became the real...
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