Eunoia, a book of lipograms, and its Canadian author, Christian Bök, recently soared through the media, appearing in the Today Programme and a giant feature in The Times. And with good reason – there is more than enough awe-inspiring work and artistic oddity in this one small book to merit airtime and column-space internationally.
Spell-check puts a red line under eunoia, which means ‘beautiful thinking’, but it should really be in Microsoft’s dictionary; it’s the shortest word in English to use all five vowels. The book Eunoia is a light hardback; but what makes it different from other thin, glittery Christmas book is that it took seven years to write. Oh, and each of the five parts only uses one vowel: the first part excludes all vowels except A, the second part does the same with E, etc. Yet, bizarrely, each story makes sense.
In his Times interview, Bök – whose was born with the surname ‘Book’, which he changed as an adult – talked about how exhausting those seven years of composition were. For part of that time, he also worked 40 hours a week at a bookshop, tutored teenagers in science and math for 20 hours a week and was writing up his PhD on French playwright Alfred Jarry at the same time. Eunoia is the work of a very sleep-deprived, fiercely determined brain.
The concept might call to mind a famous, older example, Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition, which did completely without the letter E, and still managed to flow along just fine. And if Perec’s task wasn’t enough, his translator must have had a truly awful time...
If you have a few spare minutes today, challenge yourself to take on a little of the torturous challenge that Bök set – just try to tell a story within his lipogrammatic rules. To give an example and hopefully start things off, I tried to write a few eunoi-ing sentences myself. The semi-sensical scraps below will hopefully give a small idea of what each chapter in Eunoia audaciously sets out to do, and start off more attempts:
A: Happy days at camp – Hannah (rascal!) can smash laws, attack alarms and act backwards. Pranks and maracas, yay!
E: Hefty legs, flesh-trees, bend reverently. He then feels velvet where the knees rest, trembles when the pretty speech gets Lenten.
I: His bright spirit is sick, his virility dwindling – his ill mind is inhibiting, crippling him – pity. His illicit writings, giving nihilists’ whirring mills grist, stick light-tricks in ink.
O: Dorothy knows only morons brood. Cohorts of doctors don’t blow off school to zonk from now to tomorrow. Soft old dog Toto, who slowly follows Dorothy’s torpor, rolls on hot wood floors.
U: Dumb luck; ugly churl’s bumpy truck runs surplus drugs.
Ouch.
