Monday, June 29, 2009

Eunoia

I read a review of what sounds like a fascinating book in the paper on the weekend. Here are some excerpts:


Eunoia. Sounds like a urinary tract infection, doesn't it? It's not. It's Greek for "beautiful thinking" and is the shortest English word to contain one instance of each of the English vowels. An appropriate title, then, for a book devoted to fetters of its own making...

Eunoia is a collection of "univocalic lipograms" - a verbose, tautological way of saying it contains texts each of which is devoted to one particular vowel. There are only five vowels so it's a shortish book...

"A" tells the story of Hassan Abd al-Hassad, an Agha Khan, who dies a painfully asthmatic death amid mildly magical events. ("A fantast chants 'abracadabra' as a mantra, wags a wand and (zap) a sandglass cracks.") "E" is a retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of Helen. ("She feels neglected... regrets her wretchedness... nevertheless, she keeps her deepest regrets secret".) "I" begins and ends with "I" ("Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script")...

Underpinning all of it is a central paradox, which is best summed up in a final end-note: "The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny... thought."

Lipograms go back as far as the Greeks, some of whom seem to have had an aversion to the 's' sound (the Greek letter sigma). The Roman poet Fulgentius also managed to write a history of the world (De aetatibus mundi et hominis) with each chapter omitting a different letter. If you're interested to know more, there's an interesting column here giving a brief overview of lipograms in Greek and Latin.

[Update: Yann Martel has also written a review]


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1 comment:

sarah shipley said...

cool!