Reviews

• One Good Experience.

  BOOM! Thats the sound of my mind exploding. How does Christian Bok even create something this powerful in the first place. If you haven't given it a chance now is the time. Perfect for helping you questions the English language, societies understanding and your own ability to communicate. Once you have read this you will want other copies to hand out to friends, house guests, and strangers. Thank you Christian Bok.

• Outstanding, amazing, mindblowing - a real work of art

  I utterly adore this book. Christian Bök's Eunoia is a playful example of what you can do with and without each of our five vowels. Each vowel has its own chapter, in which it has a starring role - in that no other vowel appears. At all. A univocal lipogram. You might think that this would result in a short or nonsense book. Not at all - there are genuinely 69 pages of this, before the final section (OISEAU) with some shorter riffs on the theme of alphabetic constraints. `Eunoia' is a beautiful word. It is English, and it means `beautiful thinking'. This is indeed beautiful thinking, but neatly the word is also the shortest English one to contain all five vowels. You'll understand then the French title for the second part of the book - which is actually a tribute to the Oulipo tradition it owes so much to. If restricting yourself to only using one vowel sounds like too much hard work, you may be surprised that this was not the only constraint. Here are the subsidiary rules: "All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord and tumulus). The text must minimise repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed." It's like the Ultimate Alphabet in verse - and it's amazing. You must read it.

• Wonderful book of poetry.

  Great book. Wonderful concept and it is mind-boggling to think that this as even possible.

• Clever and Funny Experimental Writing

  I have taught this book on several occasions. The word play is often breath taking. Here's an interesting incident from the first time I taught the book to a graduate class in English: I'd assigned it, and we were due to discuss it that afternoon. So I asked them, "Well, what did you think of it?" Nobody raised a hand. "Oh, come on," I said. "DId you all get to read it?" They all nodded and looked dour. "Oh, come on," I said. "Here, let me read it some of it to you." And I began to read them the text from the relatively short pages. "Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and and scrawls an alpha . . ." When I'd gone on for two pages, one of my brightest students raised his and so I looked up from the book and answered him with raised eyebrows. "Yes . . .?" Very gravely the young man said, "You didn't tell us it was funny . . . !" I was very surprised that you had to tell someone that, but some works—such as Finnegans Wake—are basically verbally playful, and when the reader can catch the voice, become highly enjoyable. Get this book and read it—preferably out loud. You will have fun!

• Quirky stories based on (multiple instances of) a single vowel per story.

  A quirky exercise in lingustics. For specialists in linguistic quirks. In one chapter, every vowel is A. Then E in the next chapter, then I, O and U in successive chapters.

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