Georges Perec Wrote a Novel Without the Letter E

Georges Perec published La Disparition in Paris in 1969. The novel runs to nearly 300 pages. It has a plot, characters, chapter breaks, and literary allusions. It does not contain the letter E.

Perec belonged to Oulipo, a Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians who imposed formal constraints on literature as a way of forcing creativity. The group's name is a contraction of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle — Workshop of Potential Literature. Its members treated rules not as obstacles but as engines: Perec believed that constraint liberated rather than confined, because it forced him away from the obvious move.

The technical term for a text that omits a particular letter is a lipogram. The letter E is the most common letter in both French and English — roughly 15% of all letters in standard French text. Writing around it requires wholesale reinvention of vocabulary. Words like "the", "he", "she", "here", "there", "where" are all gone. In French, the problem is, if anything, more acute: the language leans harder on E than English does.

What makes La Disparition more than a stunt is that the absence of E becomes the novel's subject. The book is about a disappearance — characters searching for a missing person, a missing origin, something they cannot name. Several reviewers who read it on publication did not notice the constraint and wrote straightforwardly about its themes.

Gilbert Adair translated the novel into English in 1994 as A Void — itself E-free, a separate compositional feat accomplished in a different language.