The novel with no letter E
In 1969 Georges Perec wrote a whole French novel without using the most common letter in the language. Then someone translated it into English, keeping the rule.
Try writing a paragraph without the letter e. It is the most common letter in French and in English, so the ban hits almost every sentence. In 1969 the French writer Georges Perec did it for a whole novel, La Disparition, of roughly 300 pages.
A rule as a starting point
Perec belonged to Oulipo, a French group of writers and mathematicians who held that a strict rule can free a writer rather than trap them. A text that avoids a chosen letter is called a lipogram. Perec’s was the grand version.
The book is also a mystery, and what it is about is disappearance. People vanish, and the characters keep failing to name what is missing. Readers often take the absent letter as a deliberate echo of loss. That is an interpretation, not something the author spelled out in a single sentence, but the fit is hard to ignore.
Translating the untranslatable
Translating it looks absurd: you would have to keep the plot and the rule. Gilbert Adair did exactly that in A Void, published in the mid-1990s. Because the French and English words differ, he could not translate line by line. He rebuilt passages so that the story survived and the e stayed out. Other translators have tackled the same task in other languages.
Perec also played the reverse game in Les Revenentes, where e is the only vowel that appears.
Why it is good dinner material
It is a rare case where a gimmick turns out to be serious literature. And it gives you a small party game: ask people to describe their day without an e and watch how fast they stumble.
Bring it up
“There’s a French novel of about 300 pages that never uses the letter e, and it was translated into English without an e as well.”
Follow the thread
- In contrastChekhov’s gun: what the quote really said Perec’s constraint shows the other side: deliberate omission can be as meaningful as inclusion.
- RelatedSherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” Both are reminders that what readers remember of a book can differ from what is on its pages.
- Same patternPalindromes are written into your DNA Both are wordplay where a rigid rule about letters becomes the engine of creativity.
- RelatedThe Sator Square Another text whose form is as deliberate as its meaning.
- RelatedBuffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo… Another case of English pushed to its limits by a self-imposed rule.
