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Christian Bök embarks on an ambitious exercise in Eunoia, an avant-garde work in which each chapter uses only one vowel, creating a text that fluctuates between poetry and prose. To make things more difficult, Bök constrained himself further: all chapters must allude to the art of writing, and they must describe a culinary banquet, a bawdy episode, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage. This aesthetic style pays tribute to French writer Georges Perec, whose novel A Void was written (and then translated) without the letter "e." Ultimately, Eunoia--the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels, it literally means "beautiful thinking"--is a taxing reading experience rife with repetition, although the author's vocabulary is nothing short of extraordinary. Chapter "E" comes across the smoothest: "Whenever Helen enters Hell's deepest recesses, she sees Hell's meekest dwellers. She meets the repenters, never redeemed." "U" is entertaining: "Ubu fluffs Lulu's tutu. Ubu cups Lulu's dugs; Ubu rubs Lulu's buns; thus Lulu must pull Ubu's pud." Despite the feeling of constraint that permeates the work, there are episodes of perfectly manicured and musical prose sprinkled with endearing onomatopoeia. At the end, the author explains that the text makes a "Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought." His assertion is true: Bök's technique draws the reader's attention away from the narrative to the form and then back again, conveying real ideas with a mathematical beauty of language. --Leah Eichler |
