La Disparition
This is a book without any e letter (the most common one in French). One of most knew exemple of Oulipo work.
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- I used to write short stories that didn't contain the letter 'e', inspired by George Perec's book La Disparition (cracking novel, highly recommended -- all the translations from French keep it up as well).
It's challenging, obviously, but also forces you to employ very unusual and unique language.
- there's a splash of math in some of Georges Perec's works of fiction.
a fun literary example of a structure preserving transformation is the translation of Perec's "La Disparition" from the original french-without-the-letter-e to english-without-the-letter-e.
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
- Also noteworthy, from Georges Perec: A Void (La Disparition), which was written entirely without using the letter "e" (and which the translation reproduces brilliantly well).
- For folks following this discussion, I don't know about Anglic works, but I think "la disparition"[0] and "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[1] show outstanding illustrations of lipograms for Italians and Gauls.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Disparition-French-Language-Georges-Pe...
[1] http://www.amazon.it/Allalba-Shahrazad-ammazzata-Giuseppe-Va...
- I read this book as a kid and loved it. Since then, I haven't found other works by Queneau to match it, and I've been more fascinated by Perec (especially _La Vie mode d'emploi_, though the constrained nature of the writing is not as visible; and _La Disparition_ which I find is suprisingly more than a linguistic tour de force).
- Exactly, I was about to mention George Perec, one of its members, who wrote novels under very hard constraints such as "La disparition", a whole readable novel without the letter "e", which is as hard as or harder than an English speaker would expect. He also wrote "Les Revenentes", which is a novel only using words with no other vowel than "e" (and some liberties he had to take with the language to make that work).
Interestingly, the novel with no "e" was actually translated into English multiple times (most famous one is called 'A Void'), proof that constrained writing is something quite a few people seem to enjoy.
