Unbelievable Truth : There is a 300-page novel without a single letter ‘E’

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Rapidly attempt to think 10 distinct words or names in your mind. I’m 100% sure that there will be at least one word you thought contains “e”. Up until now, this is just a couple sentences long and has effectively utilized it 14 times. Now imagine trying to write an entire novel without using ‘E’ a single time. I guarantee that you must fail.

But, this impossible work was done by a French writer Georges Perec in 1969. He wrote a complete 300 pages novel without any words which contains “e”. The name of this novel is “A Void“. The title comes from the translation of the French term La Disparition, which literally translates to English as The Disappearance.

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Perec had a remarkable writing style that was adulated by numerous. He won the prix Medicis award in France for his book Life: A User’s Manual written in 1978. This book is considered as his most famous book. The special thing about this book was the way that it had 99 sections over only a 600 page traverse. Perec was inspired to write A Void by a book “Gadsby“. This book is a story book with over 50K words without using the Letter “E”. “Gadsby” was written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939.

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Now come to the point. Actually as Perec was a French writer, he wrote this novel in French language, and through 300 pages of text, the letter ‘e’ does not appear once in the French language. In the next many translators tried to translate this novel into their native languages by doing the same thing. What was it ? Actually they tried to avoid using the most frequently used letter in their language. But, you know that it’s a super difficult work. Only the Spanish version does not use the letter ‘a’ as it is the most common letter in the language. Much like “the” or “be” in the English language, there is no instance of the most common word in the French language, which is “le”. In Spanish, the top three most frequently used words contain the letter ‘e’ (el, de and que).

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A Void is his most special work. The plot of this lipogrammatic book, follows alongside a band of people searching for somebody disappeared. It is loaded with a wide range of parodies noir and twists in the plot and finishes on a pathetic note. It even makes reference to the way that the letter “e” can not be utilized by the characters who will endure a deadly completion in the event that they do.

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reference :
http://www.odditycentral.com/art/a-void-the-famous-300-page-book-written-without-a-single-letter-e.html

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/the-novel-gadsby-has-50110-words-yet-none-of-them-contain-the-letter-e/

http://todayilearned.co.uk/2013/09/17/there-is-a-300-page-novel-without-a-single-letter-e/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

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