A WORLD OF HUMOR AND LOSS

By Paul Gray

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. To do so in this book is always risky and usually fatal.

Amid spasms of public anarchy, Anton Vowl, a Parisian insomniac in psychological discomfort, prowls his lodgings by night. Hypochondria haunts him, plus a doom that has him in thrall: "A unit is lacking. An omission, a blank, a void that nobody but him knows about, thinks about, that, flagrantly, nobody wants to know or think about. A missing link." As "panicky as a pig in an abbatoir," Vowl awaits his karma.

Not too surprisingly, Vowl must simply vanish from this book. His pals, who miss and worry about him, mass at a provincial mansion to try and find out what is afoot. This ragtag cabal scans shards of Vowl's writings, an amalgam of mumbo-jumbo, looking for hints. Will chaos or stark fatality confront all participants of this odd squad of misfits, drawn inward in companionship to look for a missing Vowl?

To sum up: probably. But wordplay soon swamps a vigorous plot. Much traditional writing is, you might say, in this book linguistically taboo, a vast anomaly calling for a radical, slightly wacky approach to put things right. To wit, this famous soliloquy that a world-class playwright wrought for a moody Scandinavian scion: "Living or not living: that is what I ask." Or an alcoholic bard's notoriously rhythmical night thoughts: "'Twas upon a midnight tristful I sat poring, wan and wistful/ Through many a quaint and curious list full of my consorts slain." A mournful coda follows: "Quoth that Black Bird, 'Not again.'"

O.K., why this whimsical hobbling of normal syntax? In a Postscript, our author accounts for his mission: "Offhand, with hindsight, I can think of many factors bubbling about in my brain, but I ought to admit right away that its origin was totally haphazard, touch and go, a flip of a coin. It all got out of hand with a companion calling my bluff (I said I could do it, this companion said I could not)."

But was doing it worth so much travail? This now paranoid critic thinks so. Adair's translation is an astounding Anglicization of Francophonic mania, a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana, of humor, pathos and loss. Go forth to your local bookstall or library, pay $24 for or borrow a copy of A Void, and savor it slowly. But stay wary and vigilant, and mind your ps and qs, to say nothing at all about your ... Aaiioouugh!