How do you write a whole novel without the letter e?

You write around the hole. A text that deliberately leaves out a letter is called a lipogram, from the Greek for "leaving out a letter". Dropping a rare letter like Z is easy, but E is the most common letter in both English and French, so the writer must give up a huge number of ordinary words and find detours for everything. In 1969 the French writer Georges Perec did it for 300 pages in La Disparition ("The Disappearance"), a novel without a single e.

The constraint is brutal. In French it rules out je ("I"), et ("and") and le ("the"). An American, Ernest Vincent Wright, had tried it in English in 1939 with Gadsby: his hardest problem was the "-ed" ending of past-tense verbs, and he could not mention any number between six and thirty.

Perec's genius was to make the missing letter the story. The novel is a mystery about a man who has vanished, Anton Voyl, whose name is the French word voyelle ("vowel") stripped of its e's. The characters slowly realize something is missing, and those who come too close to naming it die. Perec even plants clues, like a set of 26 books with volume 5 missing.

There is a sadder layer. Perec's father died in World War II and his mother in the Holocaust. The critic Warren Motte notes that without e, Perec cannot write père (father), mère (mother), parents, famille, or even his own name. A word game became a book about absence. And the translators played along: the English version, A Void, also has no e.