Eunoia
Christian Bök
publisher: Coach House Books, 2001
isbn: 1-5245-092-9
price: $16.95
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks -- impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic?
[50]
Besides being glib and chic, Bök's new book strikes one with the force of being the most incredible literary curio -- each of its chapters is only allowed to use one vowel, out-gunning the Oulipian Perec by four -- and yet a sort of heroic, epic undertaking.
Taking seven years to write (the time it took Joyce to write Ulysses), Eunoia -- which means "beautiful thinking" and is the shortest word in the English language to employ all the vowels -- uses other constraints, including the same length for each paragraph, parrallel sentence structures and tons of internal rhyme. Furthermore, each of its chapters must "allude to the art of writing [and] must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage."
This hyper-mechanization of the writer's craft sets the stage for a welter of eccentric, yet universally appealing, tours-de-force, such as Chapter E's retelling of the Odyssey from the viewpoint of Helen:
Whenever Helen seeks these perverse excesses, her regretted deeds depress her; hence, Helen beseeches Ceres (the blessed Demeter): 'let sweet Lethe bless me, lest these recent events be rememberd' -- then the empress feeds herself fermented hempseed, her preferred nepenthe.
[37]
Each vowel infects the writing with its specific tone and content: the "a" chapter, the tale of Hassan "an Agha Khan", is the most mellifluous, an Orientalist playground of Arabs and naptha lamps, while the "u" chapter presents the most intense vision of lustful excess under the stress of arbitrary restraints, in which "Dutch smut churns up blushful succubus lusts," and Ubu and Lulu burp, hump and bump for five delirious pages, exhausting, in the meantime, the entire range of English words that only contain the vowel "u."
"Oiseau," the second half of this book, is a collection of shorter works such as Bök's homage to the "w," a poem that uses no vowels but the letter "y" (more than you'd think), and his phonetic translation of Rimbaud's sonnet "Voyelle," thus cementing this poet's allegience to a language that literally seems to write itself, provided it find the perfect obsessive and linguistically adept host.
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