A Void by Georges Perec
Published 1969 · 84,369 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · experimental fiction, detective fiction, metafiction, French literature
How hard is A Void to read?
A Void scores 83 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 82 out of 100
- Gilbert Adair's translation sustains the lipogram's constraint throughout, producing a prose surface bristling with recherché synonyms, archaic registers, and oblique circumlocutions that stand in for any word containing the letter 'e'. Readers encounter words like 'otolaryngologist', 'naso-pharynx', 'tympanum', 'auscultation', and 'sublingual barbs' within the first chapter alone. The lexical pressure is relentless: ordinary concepts must always be expressed at a slant, forcing extraordinary vocabulary into every paragraph.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Sentences are long and clause-laden — the constraint demands elaborate paraphrasis where simple words would ordinarily suffice. Subordinate clauses pile up to avoid the forbidden letter; parenthetical asides, lists, and appositive chains proliferate. The effect is neither stream-of-consciousness nor periodic prose but something more driven: syntactic elaboration as lipogrammatic survival strategy.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Much of the novel operates at a concrete level of plot, dialogue, and physical description, but the constraint itself is an abstraction the reader must conceptualise to make sense of the text. Passages in the postscript discuss structuralist theory, signification, and the Saussurean signifiant directly. Recurring meditations on 'the void', the missing sign, and taboo operate as both narrative conceit and philosophical abstraction.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Each sentence carries a double burden: it must advance the plot while satisfying the lipogrammatic constraint. Allusions to Bioy Casares, Morel, Kafka, Joyce, the Oedipus myth, Hartmann von Aue, Thomas Mann, Mallarmé, and dozens more are embedded in the narrative fabric without annotation. Characters deliver long embedded stories, each containing sub-narratives. The chapter-summary table of contents alone encodes layers of wordplay.
- Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
- The entire novel is one sustained act of narrative indirection. The central fact — the missing letter 'e' — is never named. The plot follows Anton Vowl, whose disappearance drives an investigation, but that surface mystery is a displacement of the true mystery (the constraint). Characters within the novel also cannot name the taboo afflicting them. Stories nest inside stories; the Ishmail-Morel episode is itself a displaced re-telling of the protagonist's predicament. Meaning is systematically withheld at every level.
- Symbolic density: 90 out of 100
- 'A Void' operates as sustained allegory: the missing letter 'e' symbolises absence, loss, the Holocaust, Perec's dead parents, the unspeakable in psychoanalytic and political senses. Anton Vowl's name is a pointed cipher. Every disappearance in the novel (Vowl, the Clifford line, the cousins, the carp Jonah, the letter on the billiard cloth) is a resonant doubling. The book is saturated with symbolic systems — the Zahir, the Sphinx, the labyrinth, the void — all pointing to the same irreplaceable absence.
- Ironic distance: 85 out of 100
- Perec adopts an elaborate, mock-solemn narrative voice that treats grotesque events — explosions, serial killings, characters inflating and bursting — with the same deadpan gravity as mundane daily entries. The irony is structural: the book constantly points at what it cannot say. The postscript, where the author speaks directly about the constraint as a 'spur to imagination', converts the entire novel into an ironic act of self-concealment-as-revelation.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- The novel ends with virtually every character dead. The mystery of Vowl's disappearance is explained only partially and in the most oblique terms. The taboo constraint — the explanation for everything — is finally gestured at but never uttered. Swann's postscript monologue acknowledges that the story reaches 'its last word' without attaining 'its cardinal point, its horizon, its infinity'. The reader who does not know French literature or OuLiPo will find the resolution genuinely withheld.
- Structural complexity: 86 out of 100
- Twenty-six chapters (with Chapter 5 conspicuously absent, mirroring the missing fifth letter in the alphabet sequence). A nested-narrative architecture in which embedded tales — the island story, Aignan's Bildungsroman, the military tribunal story — are told within the frame narrative by characters around a table. The text also includes verse passages, dramatic dialogues, chapter-summary tables, a postscript, and a structural postulate (the constraint itself) that organises every decision at the level of the phoneme.
How A Void is regarded
A Void holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.