This is an amazing book. Amazing.
The first chapter (Chapter A) is an interesting story written in a quirky style:
Alarms clang as a radarman tracks an attack craft that can jam radar and dart past flak at half a Mach: ack-ack-ack, rat-tat-tat.
You could almost be forgiven for not noticing that the only vowel it uses is A. And that goes for the whole chapter. And no cheating by using the pseudo-vowel Y either.
And then on to Chapter E. I remember an older, perhaps more well-known E-only story, The Exeter Text (original title Les Revenentes) by Georges Perec. That one is a bit of a slog: it’s clunky and relies on creative misspellings and abbreviations (even the original title is misspelled to change an a to an e). As Dr Johnson might have said, “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” In contrast, Chapter E of Eunioa reads quite naturally:
Whenever Helen needs effervescent refreshments, she tells her expert brewer: ‘brew me the best beer ever brewed’.
To be fair to Perec, he wrote Les Revenentes after writing La Disparation, his epic full length E-less novel, so he needed somewhere to put all those unused Es. I haven’t read the original, but it’s probably not so bad since E is even more used in French than it is in English. (French Scrabble has 15 E tiles, while English Scrabble has only 12.) The really hard work was carried out by the English translator, Ian Monk, who did a great job with a nearly impossible task. My favourite part is probably the title page:
Perec
The Exeter Text
Jewels, Secrets, Sex
Renderer: E. N. Menk
The Hervll Press
Leeds & Peebles
Back to Eunoia. After Chapter E, naturally, are chapters I, O and U. Each tells a similar story although of course no characters reappear (since they couldn’t be named). After these five chapters there is some discussion of the rules behind them, which were actually more prescriptive than I first thought – very impressive! I know that constraints can sometimes make writing easier, but maybe not in this case.
There are also some other short chapters with similar word games, and the book finishes with a sort of tribute to Perec’s Les Revenentes. The whole book is incredibly clever — I spent a lot of time shaking my head in disbelief at the ingenuity — yet quite a lot of fun.