Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains every vowel. Bök defines the word as meaning “beautiful thinking”. This book is a marvel of constraint. Its wonderful, beautiful, surprising, and just pretty amazing in general. I would link to the Amazon page for this book, but it turns out that Coach House Books has actually posted the entirety of the book on their website.
The book is technically a lipogram, or a work in which a letter or group of letters are missing, forming a constraint game for the author. Christian Bök has done this by eliminating all but one vowel from each chapter. Its really pretty amazing how far he is willing to go with the restraint, as he has extra rules that each chapter must follow.
All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus.) The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
Essentially, he has written a pretty astounding little book. If I remember right, it took him 7 years to put together, but can easily be read in an afternoon. The chapters begin to take on a character of their own. What starts as an impressive genre exercise also reveals itself as a thoughtful examination of the English language. Reading it might teach you a thing or two.
Some precedents, for those interested, are Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, in which he uses an alliterative device allowing in the first chapter for only words that begin with “A”, for the second both “A” and “B”, and so on and so forth. A Void by George Perec avoids the use of the letter “e” for the entirety of the novel. This is the most common letter in both French and English, so the translation is perhaps more of a work of constraint than the original was.
These exercises are all born out of the Oulipo school, which I will most likely talk about a great deal, these authors being one of my chief interests. More on that later.
