Christian BökCritiques

Contrasted with some of Bok's (pardon my keyboard's limited range of expression) other work, "The Xenotext" lacks some of the lyrical beauty and rhythmic power that I would expect. Despite ths, it carries beautiful, heavy meaning.

I watch Bok's work, hoping he will one day write something with the musical beauty of "Eunoia" and the thumping eschatological weight of "The Xenotext." Until then, I periodically enjoy re-reading his existing work - without quite reaching perfection, it seems to me to be outstanding.

Bok (excuse my keyboard's limited range of expression) has, in Eunoia and other works, shown a true mastery of language. The tone and rhythm of Eunoia are impeccable throughout. It reads, to me, with unusual musicality.

What I believe it is missing is a purpose. The meanings of the miniature epics are superficial and, to my ear, do not remain entirely coherent throughout even twenty contiguous pages. I think all of the critiques I have seen from the others here are correct, except perhaps the statement that the words "grate on the [...] ear"

Eunoia is a superior speciment of abstract art through the medium of poetry, and I recommend it very strongly. Unfortunately for me, I tend to find myself emotionally unmoved by abstract art in any medium.

Non è il libro che fa per me. Ho trovato l'idea dietro questo libro molto interessante e per questo volevo leggerlo, ma fin dalle prime pagine è stato un supplizio ;u; peccato.

I should have brought this book with me when I moved, but now it sits lonely in storage. I think about Bok all the time. Reading this aloud is essential.

I should have brought this book with me when I moved, but now it sits lonely in storage. I think about Bok all the time. Reading this aloud is essential.

WOW

This book, for me, was all about wordplay amidst rhythmic variations. The ideas themselves are abstract and some of the poems were dubious in their comprehension. Nevertheless, it was an interesting collection.

This is a fascinating project from the point of view of images and writing. Four related topics:

Words and images in relation to the conceptual project. This book is “an introduction” to the “conceptual groundwork” of a real-life project, which is a poem encoded in DNA in a bacterium, and another poem that is produced when that poem is read and translated by the bacterium’s cells into a protein. Presumably those actual poems, or the sum total of genetically modified bacteria, comprise “Book 2.” In this sense the images in The Xenotext are motivated differently from those in Crystallography. Both are “aesthetic” projects (the word Bök uses), but The Xenotext is explicitly an introduction to something that exists elsewhere, outside of books and even of human agency. That gives the images in The Xenotext a significance that images don’t have in any other work of fiction that I know: they point to real-world correlates in the way that scientific images ordinarily do.

Questions of design. The graphics in The Xenotext are also more crafted, more polished and well-presented, than those in Crystallography. Their professionalism is partly an artifact of the professional chemist’s software that produces them: the ribbon diagrams and charge envelopes on pp. 105-12 are straight from the professional software. (Bök advertises that they were drawn with a supercomputer, but the graphics themselves, without the computing tasks he set, are routinely drawn on personal computers.) In other cases he has chosen fonts, line strengths, and spacing to make diagrams that are both professional-looking and designed. The result is that the QR codes and Conway’s “Life” game cells match well with the diagrams of amino acids (pp. 117, 118), which match well with the star chart that ends the book (p. 147). In Crystallography, some images seemed done on Bök’s own personal computer, others were collaged, and still others were photographed from 18th and 19th century sources (or from the internet). There is no such heterogeneity here. I mention this because the uniformity and care of the images in The Xenotext brings real, professional science into the book in a way that the poetic text does not. There is real genetics and laboratory work behind The Xenotext, but the poems and prose are highly inflected by Bök’s poetics. The images, by default, are what remain to represent genetic science. (There are minor exceptions, such as the chemical formulae in footnotes on pp. 118-37.) So both in terms of the book’s conceptual (and post-human) project as “living poetry,” and also in terms of the book’s design, the illustrations work as signifiers of science.

The dialogic relation of images, diagrams, text. Throughout this Writing with Images project, I’ve been interested in the possibility that visual material might request or require the same amount of attention as text, so images would not function only as illustrations, examples, or ornaments, but would drive, inform, and otherwise direct the reading (This is theorized in Chapter 5.) Very few writers do this, Sebald and other prominent examples includes. The Xenotext comes the closest of any of the texts I’ve seen to accomplishing such an equality of images, diagrams, and writing.

One part of the book in particular creates an unusual sequence of reading, in which an attentive reader, who cares about sense and not only expression, will have to turn back and forth repeatedly, from image to text and back. “The March of the Nucleotides” illustrates how a gene can be written as a poem, and used to produce a protein. Bök begins with a poem, constrained so it makes a spiral pattern, like DNA, and incorporates words that end in the conventional abbreviations for nucleotides (A, C, G, T). A plausible reading order here is:

(1) background (p. 154), (2) description (p. 98), (3) diagram of the gene (p. 81), (4) diagram of the nucleotide molecule (p. 99; this is the least helpful or pertinent), (5) the poem itself (pp. 100-2), (6) the codons that produce the amino acids (p. 103), (7) the computer-generated images of the resulting protein (pp. 105-8), together with (8) their key (p. 104).

Of these pages, only three are text. Four are colored printouts, two are line drawings, and four are formatted text. It’s the most complete integration of images and text I know, provided a reader is trying actively to follow the transcription process. If not, it probably disintegrates by stages into a reading of the poem and a glance at the other pages.

The book’s style and tone. I’ll conclude with some thoughts on the book’s style, because they impinge on the question of constrained writing. It isn’t possible, I think, to agree with reviewers who say things like “his poems echo the strains of the ancients,” or “already these poems feel eternal, as if they’ve been with us since Virgil, since Homer.” The poetry is intentionally cosmic, portentous, and grandiose. Much is written in what Quintilian and Cicero called the “grand” and “ornate” style. But it isn’t at all simply “ancient” or “heroic” in the unironic manner of Virgil or Homer. “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which translates Virgil’s fourth Goergic are especially clearly the product of an early 21st century writer, especially because of the mixture of the stock of 18th century English poetry (“swales” and “swains” and locutions like “he hath leave to cross”), Swinburnean or Coleridgean excesses (“quenching,” “grieving,” “fountainous battlements,” and “distraught cries” from “damsels”), and contemporary jargon (especially including genetics). The opening section, “The Late Heavy Bombardment,” is a bombardment of stentorian, portentous, hyperbolic archaisms. (“What dire seed must these onslaughts have scattered, like shrapnel, across your cremated badlands”–sentences like that read like a comic book version of Geoffrey Hill.) Both sections are voiced with a combination of fin-de-siecle bombast and postmodern hyperornamentation, and if parts aren’t laughable then you might consider how you’re reading Virgil and Homer, or for that matter how seriously you’re taking the equally cosmic speeches put in the mouths of Marvell characters in movies. (I mean you’re likely not laughing as much as you should at the cosmic speeches of characters like the Silver Surfer.)

(The Virgil material in particular is a curious addition to the book. I haven’t yet read a review that attempts to explain it. Bök suggests Virgil “guided a poet” (Dante!) in the way that he, Bök, guides the reader; he also mentions that a line from the second Georgic was the first to be encoded into the DNA of a plant; and he says in several ways that the fourth Georgic is about absolution and redemption for sending things like bees, and more broadly Nature, “to Hell.” But none of those would seem to justify the inclusion of an eccentric translation of the entire of the fourth Georgic. The insistent demands placed on a reader by the bizarre translation resonate in a curious way with the demands produced by the “poetic primer” of genetics. Both will be difficult for most readers, especially those who haven’t read the fourth Georgic, or don’t remember their college genetics. The disconnected parallel–a long text by a Roman author, and a long series of “primers” of genetics–reminds me of Derrida’s “clanging,” in Glas, between Hegel and Genet: they just don’t belong together, and yet there they are.)

All that is saved from being fairly unremittingly unintentionally humorous by being constrained in many ways. There are at least three kinds of constraints:

(1) Those provided by the conventional labeling in biochemistry: words beginning with “O,” for example, when it is necessary to signify Oxygen; or words ending in A, T, G, or C when it is necessary to signify nucleotides (pp. 100-2).
(2) Those provided by poetics: the virelay, the lipogram, the acrostic, the grimoire, and so forth.
(3) Those added by Bök to echo or elaborate (1) or (2): for example the limitation, in some poems, to words of exactly nine letters (pp. 86-95, 100-2). I think this self-imposed restriction, which he announces on p. 154, is intended to produce a harmony with the three-letter codons (in relation to pp. 100-2) — although of course the steps of the DNA ladder aren’t nine units across.

These molecular, poetic, and aesthetic constraints produce produce a constantly unpredictable shifting series of warps that cannot easily be assigned to a single voice. The awkwardnesses warp the intended tone, as it does in the English translation of Perec’s La Disparition (A Void), which sounds sometimes like a mockery of 18th century prose, and other times like a tin-eared attempt to mimic some regional accent or creole. Those unpredictable effects are saving graces. Otherwise The Xenotext would be overrun by its author’s grandiosity. I especially like the weird repetitions he forces himself into in “The Virelay of the Amino Acids,” where he gives himself the task of writing a poem for each of the amino acids, restricting himself to words that begin with the letters of the atoms (Carbon, Nitrogen, etc.). What is weird, and effective, is that there’s no reason why the words couldn’t have been more varied (many words begin with “C” and “N”) but he chooses repetitions at the same time as he imposes repetitions on himself. The result is a language that tries to be both “grand” and “ornate” and is continuously hobbled. It is very effective, and I’m inclined to agree with Marjorie Perloff’s endorsement: “one of the most beautiful poems of our time.”

The larger context of this review is here:

http://writingwithimages.com/?page_id...

(Scroll to the bottom section of the essay.)

This turned out to actually be a really interesting read. Though short it is full of insight relevent not just to some obscure poetical form but for aesthetics as a whole. I have always loved Jarry but despite the ubiquity of his name throughout avant-garde literature this is the first peice that I have been able to find that takes a critical and philosophical look at what it was he was actually doing (important for the fact that Jarry never outright explained it, rather he acted upon it, in life as well as in wiriting).

The elegance of Bok's writing makes the erudite concepts easy to follow despite ones not always being familiar with particular postmodern philosophies concerning language and knowledge. Definitely serves as a jumping off point into some really great stuff. I couldn't agree more with Bok in his description of Jarry's paralogy as not being against logic or rationality, but as serving to reconcile math and science with poetry. Where "in the world of possibilities, reality is the exception," Jarry offers a pataphysical universe where poetic exploration serves as a liberation from paradigmatic constraints on actual existence, not as a type of metaphysical transcendence that fills the new age isles in every bookstore but as a pataphysical reality in which meaning is liberated from objectivity and epistemelogical anarchy serves as the impetus to an infinite amount of permutations for creativity. "To explore the rule is to be emancipated from it by becoming the master of its potential for surprise, whereas to ignore the rule is to be imprisoned in it by becoming the slave to the reprise of its intention." Rule is not puerily caste aside for some sort of petulant rebellion, rather it is apperceptively used and superextended in a hyperbolic Umour that creates its own world replete with charicatured contradictions and personified irony, getting one over on metaphysics by getting one over on itself.

The historical mapping of Jarry's ideas was also very enjoyable to read. I had never considered the futurists as being so intimately related to Jarry before, never really knew what the hell Oulipo was doing (l'OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, who knew?), and never even heard of the Canadian Jarryites before. Overall Bok's breakdown of the structure and nature of Pataphysics (though not being exhaustive) and his extensive knowledge of those who do and have experimented within 'Pataphysics (both poets and philosophers alike) make this well worth the time and reinvigorates the individual creative process, not by offering some new form or fad, but by looking into the nature of the poetic experience itself(be it writing or reading) as being just as fantastical as that of the logical and thus instilling the poetic back into the scientific, the scientific with the poetic, and revealing the distinction as merely superficial when, all things being equal, reality is just as outrageous as what it could have been, and by extension, will be. Ha-Ha

am still ruminating & regesting; very nice to have a survey of post-jarry pataphysics; very heady (and ironic?) to read it in such academic prose, but that's how it is

nothing i'd read to my aunt irma long distance over a telephone, but some folks here i know will dig it 'tho


"pataphysics is the science ... "

[The following review is abbreviated. The full review, with images, is at http://writingwithimages.com/?page_id=342]

At the moment, Bök is probably one of the two most-read conceptual writers in English; the other is Kenneth Goldsmith, who is thanked in the book. "Eunoia" is a more consistent book, but raises some of the same issues.

Four reactions to this book, arranged pseudo-scientifically, like Bök's arrangements, leading from local to larger-scale issues.

1. The ghost of Escher

From an art historical or art critical point of view, it's a bad sign that the book begins with a page-long quotation from Escher, who has invariably been a sign of a certain misunderstanding of modernisms and postmodernisms. Escher is popular with chemists—he still appears in introductory textbooks, which is appropriate for this book—but not with people engaged with current possibilities of the image. From an expressive standpoint, the epigraph signals the likelihood that Bök will be engrossed in structural games, and that those games and rules might owe more to Escher's kind of compulsive mathematized imagination than to concerns that stem from Oulipo or conceptual poetry.

There are a number of passages in the book where Bök's games seem compulsive in Escher's particular, emotionally stunted, myopically neurotic, algorithmically limited, aesthetically adolescent fashion. Even in the graphics—especially the mylar graphic—it's not possible to imagine much other than an author unreflectively obsessing about the placement of X's in page-layout software. (What is the difference between Escher's unpleasantly narrow experiments, which have exiled him from the narratives of modernism, and Roussel's wonderfully narrow experiments, which have put him at the center of stories about modernism?)

2. The role of crystallography

I come at this book with some knowledge of crystallography: I know Haüy, Bravais, birefringence, and crystal classes. I'm aware that bringing a specialized knowledge to a book that does not demand that knowledge of its readers is risky and usually irrelevant. (I'm also aware that the book isn't about crystallography.) But this knowledge does yield several things that are pertinent to a general reading.

(a) I can see how, in some sections, Bök is trying to find verbal equivalents to crystallographic facts, and fails. The way he fails is significant. In the poem "Birefringence," he tries to conjure interference colors by comparing them to stained glass, "gasoline rainbows," "iridescent / insects," and several other things. The result, for someone who knows the colors, is insufficient; and for someone who doesn't, the result is scattered in an illegible fashion: that is, the illegibility appears to be rule-driven and its obscurity related to language games, but actually it is caused by limitations in the author's descriptive power.

(b) In the poem on Miller, Bök makes what I experience as a half-hearted attempt to conjure Miller indices (comparing them to the Dewey decimal system): what matters is that I can see this is half-hearted, because of the impossibility of conjuring something like Miller's system: Bök knows the attempt is tepid, but that he doesn't need to be more precise because his readers will not judge that aspect of the book—but poems like the one on Miller demonstrate how loosely he regards his crystallographic master metaphor: a looseness that is not at all projected by the book. I wonder if the book could have been even stronger if he had found a way to signal the looseness of his attachment to his non-poetic sources.

(c) Specialist knowledge is also pertinent because the book's appeal should not, even from Bök's point of view, depend on the hundreds of polysyllabic technical terms: their exoticism and opacity can't be the central strength or indispensable strategy of the book. When those terms aren't opaque (for readers who know some crystallography), they reveal themselves more clearly as inexact references chosen in accord with very loose criteria: they are used to suggest global parallels with some poetics, or to provide Greek- or Latin-sounding obstructions to the text.

(Incidentally, there is a similarity between Bök's taste in crystallographic illustration and mine. When I first read this book I suspected he had taken two illustrations from a book of mine, "Domain of Images," which has a chapter of crystallography, which is also, like this book, one of the few texts on crystallography that is not intended as a contribution to science. Bök reproduces two very obscure images I also have in my book on pp. 119 and 129. But Bök's book was published in 1994, before mine, so it's evidence of a similar sense of what counts as an interesting crystallographic image.)

3. Emotional passages

There is one section of the book, "Diamonds" (p. 64), that is self-contained and different from the rest of the book. "Diamonds" purports to be about the author's father, a diamond cutter. It is affectively direct, and scientifically minimal. It isn't a flaw, in a book about flaws, to have a section that's separate: but it is problematic to have that difference consist in directly emotional and even confessional prose, and to have that direct appeal to feeling be tied to a dilution of the scientific poetics, because that means the other sections—most of the book—require science in order not to speak directly about emotions, and that, I think, is not Bök's purpose.

4. Self-imposed rules

The fundamental issue in all these points (1, 2, 3) is the role played by self-imposed rules: the master trope of crystallography, and the many smaller rules that govern how individual concepts and people are articulated as poetry. My concern here is the irregular application of those rules, and the kinds of occasions and contexts where Bök permits himself to bend or suspend the rules.

As in "Eunoia," the rule-bound construction of the book is continuously undermined by clearly aesthetic choices, freely made, which are themselves almost always the result of specific late-romantic and modernist allegiances. Sometimes Bök sounds like Celan ("Bleeding away / ages of images," p. 30), sometimes Bachelard ("A crystal is the flashpoint of a dream intense / enough to purge the eye of its infection, sight," p. 37), sometimes A.R. Ammons or his admirer the chemist Roald Hoffmann ("A word (like love) has a high refractive index," p. 37). Much of this material is late romantic, including typical romantic natural science interests like abyssal creatures and invertebrates ("lammelibranchs, coelenterates. / the lost animalculae from alien seas" (p. 47). The specter of Escher returns whenever the rules appear to be constructed by the author in order to articulate his own repetition compulsions: "any path that you take / breaks from its route / in the way that a root / word, when said, gets / tangled in its ganglia" (p. 44). This is rum poetry, driven by a nearly autistic sort of compulsion, much like the long lists of supposedly similar things in Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa." All these non-rule-bound emulations and aesthetic choices distract from the book's rule-bound, self-proclaimed metaphoric purpose. As in "Eunoia," I wish he had either presented these as also rule-bound ("I choose Celan because he is the poet of the crystal fragment," etc.) or purged them from the text in favor of echoes and allusions that remain illegible.½

This book is definitely an acquired taste, and one which I would recommend only to people who love words, word games, and linguistic oddities. It just so happens that I’m one of those people. The majority of Eunoia consists of five chapters; A, E, I, O, and U. Each is dedicated to its title vowel, the only vowel to occur within the chapter. The rest of the book is a section called ‘Oiseau’ and consists of a series of clever poems/word exercises.

The first five chapters were largely enjoyable, each managing to follow a story to a greater or lesser degree. Chapter E was absolutely outstanding - a retelling of the Iliad focusing upon Helen of Troy – and for this chapter alone Bök deserves a literary prize. At the very back of the book there are rules listed for what each chapter must contain, and although I think the rules should have been placed before the ‘Oiseau’ section I was pleased that they were included after the chapters. By introducing the rules after the reader had already worked through the chapters, and enjoyed them on their own merit, it allowed the chance to reread the stories and appreciate them in a new light. The only thing which really spoils these chapters is Bök’s insistence on adding rather pervy sex scenes: it’s utterly unnecessary.

The ‘Oiseau’ section is, if possible, even more obscure. The highlights have got to be the poem containing only the letters in the word ‘vowel’ and the ode to the letter W. I adored most of this book, and have a great deal of respect for Bök’s linguistic abilities, but feel I should point out that it is really not for the average reader.

The principal piece in this book is Eunoia, a univocalic lipogram in 5 chapters. Each chapter consists entirely of words using only a single vowel (one vowel per chapter). As with most poetry, it works best when read aloud so that the sounds can be fully appreciated. Although it's written in English there are occasional appearances of words from other languages, mostly French but also some German and Latin and at least one bit of Spanish, so a reading knowledge of these languages is handy, though not essential. I enjoyed it more for the sonic effect than for any actual plot that might have been contained within the chapters.

There is also a collection of shorter poems, entitled Oiseau, which pays homage to the French antecedents of Eunoia (i.e. lipogrammic poetry), and a brief afterword explaining the motivation behind the poems and the extra constraints imposed on Eunoia (as if writing with only one vowel were not sufficient challenge).

"Eunoia, which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels."

The concept behind this book is intriguing: Five chapters, one devoted to each vowel, that vowel being the only to occur in its chapter. This could go one of two ways: Clearly, it's a wordsmithing exercise and could easily be what I refer to as "mental masturbation," or it could end up being delightfully euphonic and imaginative.

I feel Bök was striving for the latter but that the result was closer to the former. There were certainly moments, as images ethereal flitted by, evoked by words that, because of the nature of the exercise, flowed from subject to seemingly disparate subject in what felt like stream of consciousness. But then there was the awkwardness, as the meanings of words were drastically bent to make them fit the exercise, foreign-language phrases substituted for wrong-vowelled English words, and laundry lists of words gratuitously thrown in. In the end, rather than being delightful to read, I found it mostly tedious.

Eunoia describes itself as a novel, but it's more like a prose poem or concept piece. The only chapter that has any coherent sense of plot is Chapter E, a retelling of The Iliad. (Other chapters have plots, but they are so absurd and disjointed that I can't take them seriously.)

Now, my friends know that I am anything but a prude, but I found it just a bit disturbing that every chapter contained graphic sex. Then I read the explanatory pages at the very end and it made more sense:

"Eunoia abides by many 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…. The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary…. The letter Y is suppressed."

These final few pages should really have been a preface. I might have enjoyed the text more as a word game of sorts had I been aware of these subsidiary rules instead of attempting to parse it as a story.

There is more to Eunoia than the exercise in assonance. After the five single-vowelled chapters there is a small collection of "poems". These are also wordsmithing exercises, but they are more enjoyable to read. The elegy for the letter W is particularly delightful.

In conclusion, if you like clever, challenging word exercises, you might enjoy Eunoia. But if, like me, you're looking for more, you're likely to find it rather tedious.

A small but complex book, more sound poetry than anything else. The first section is a series of chapters using only one vowel and as many different words as possible, As a very visual person I missed the other ' rules' as I got caught up in the patterns, the spikiness of i for instance is particularily clear.
A tour de force of word play that I need to revisit to look for the internal themes.

An impressive book that took years for Bok to complete, Eunoia uses only 1 vowel in each of the 5 chapters. I mainly read this by dipping in sporadically, as I found it difficult to read for long periods of time, but anyone, even those with no interest in poetry can appreciate the feat that he has pulled off here.

I was lucky to get a copy of the paperback version of this book as a prepublication copy through the member giveaway programme.

Eunoia is an amazing book - it is, to my mind, a book of poems in that the beauty of language is the focus more than the story.

The first five chapters are each dedicated to a vowel (in alphabetical order), and each chapter only contains words containing that voewl and no other. What is more, the author has constrained the stories in other ways and used the majority of all words that he could use in the writing.

After these five chapters there are other random experiments in language, such as the poem written only with the letters in the word "vowels".

I am very glad I read this book. It was an amazing feat of language that took the author 7 years to write (and the only surprise was that he could complete it at all). On the downside it is not an easy read! The constraints of the book make the language hard going. There were words there I had to look up (and I generally don't have that problem).

The mixture of words that in other works would be clearly pretentious with occasional gutter language also felt odd. Particularly in the "u" chapter, I was both impressed and dissapointed that the writer could describe sexual intercourse using just words with the "u" vowel - but imaginations will not run far as to which words he used. That rather sullied the beauty of the book in my opinion.

Hard going it might be, but this was not a long book and it was very much worth the read. Anyone who loves language cannot help but be impressed by what is achieved here.½

I first heard of this book through a radio program and it intrigued me. Eunoia (meaning "beautiful thinking") is the shortest English word containing all five vowels and each of the five main chapters of this book are restricted to just one. There are additional rules:

i) Each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing.
ii) Each chapter must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage.
iii) All the sentences have to have an, "accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism." (I have to confess, I don't know what syntactical parallelism is).
iv) The text has to include as many possible words in it as it can.
v) The text must avoid repeating words as much as possible.
vi) The letter "Y" is to be avoided.

So you can see that, irrespective of my thoughts, or those of anyone else, this book is a pretty impressive feat.

Additional chapters (grouped in "Oiseau" (bird; the shortest word in the French language to contain all five vowels) include "And Sometimes", a list of all words in the English language containing no vowels; "Vowels", a series of poems in which all the words are anagrams of the words in the first line; and "Emended Excess", a poem which using the words containing just the letter E, not used in Chapter E.

It's very clever and the rhythms that emerge from the single vowel chapters had very distinct sounds - something I enjoyed. However... I suspect that this book would probably be appreciated far more by someone who really enjoys analysing poetry. For me, (and here I confess that I do not read a lot of poetry - an important aside), it was just trying a little too hard - it was too calculated. I couldn't help but feel that if all the additional rules (or at least the first two in combination) weren't there, the text would flow so much better. For example, in nearly every chapter, it felt disjointed to skip from talking about writing, to the "story" part.

So, while my imagination was caught by the idea of the exercise, I didn't really get beyond this. Almost certainly a book for someone who likes to pull apart their poetry and admire the technique however.

Oh, and I enjoyed the discovery of a great new word (Eunoia)!

But why does Bök cripple the interest of his book by using Perec-style rules of inclusion: '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' (that is from Bök's Afterword, called 'The New Ennui'). Yes, the language is mesmerizing, and it's true that Oulipo-style restrictions, as in Perec's work, can produce unpredictable and consistently fascinating distortions of conventional narrative lines and ordinary usages. Those inventions owe their hypnotic quality to the fact that a reader can't decipher the tone, the voice, the style of the text because language is continuously deviated by rules that have nothing to do with ordinary narrative. All that is well known, and enjoyed, by fans of Roussel, Perec, and the other Oulipo writers. I entirely agree, and that is why I bought this book. But there is a second-order logic that is missing from Oulipo, and it becomes evident here. Why insist on just that assemblage of disparate narrative elements (the nautical scene, etc.)? Superficially, because it is yet another apparently random, willful restriction on conventional writing.

But that is only a superficial answer, and the lack of a better answer goes to a blindness in Oulipo. Consider the reader interested in the passages that 'allude to the art of writing.' Consider the momentary annoyance such a reader feels as the narrative inevitably swerves aside to accommodate the 'culinary banquet.' Annoyance and 'chafing' (one of Robbe-Grillet's words) is integral to the project of Oulipo, but not that specific annoyance. It remains at the level of ordinary narrative engagement, and is not folded back into the new experience generated by the rule-bound text. This book, and some of Perec's, would be so much stronger if the choice of mandatory subjects, and the transitions between them, were motivated at the level of the language, and not at the level of the critique of literary forms. As a reader, I relish annoyance: I don't mind it, and I actually look for it. But I want to know that it resonates with the act of reading, and not just with a loose, unjustified, arbitrary accumulation of generative rules.½

Upon being presented with the book (it was a birthday gift), I was warned that while the claims of the blurb that the book would reveal characteristics of the vowels might seem trite, I should read the book before formulating opinions upon the hyperbole of advertising or the arrogance of the author. Having read the book, I come to the conclusion that Mr Bok may be as arrogant as he pleases. The experiments he does with language are worthy of praise.

A pretty short book, but fun to read. The first five chapters each use only one vowel, as well as following various other rules (e.g. "must describe a nautical voyage", "must avoid the letter y", etc.) which are described at the end. The rest of the book contains various other examples of restricted forms of writing.

I found myself reading large parts of this out loud. It seems there are many more one-vowel words than I thought -- the "e" chapter manages to describe the Battle of Troy, and the "u" chapter has an entire sex scene. I was pretty impressed!

Cool poetry with vowels, good words that sound neat together.

silly in an irritating way. There is hardly a line or sentence that doesn't grate on the inner or outer ear.

The obvious temptation in reviewing Eunoia is to compose some cute sentences that mimic its style (not to worry, Christian Bök won’t be suffering that indignity here). This, of course, is because Eunoia is a brief novel (or long poem) comprising five chapters, each of which is univocally lipogrammatic: “Goons who shoot folks knock down doors, storm control rooms. Bronx cops do crowd control. Corps of shock-troops cordon off two blocks of shops to look for kooks who concoct knock-off bombs.�€? As if laboring under this restriction weren’t enough of a feat, Bök has employed virtually every word in the English language (and some from other tongues) that fits his parameters. Eunoia’s extensive vocabulary wasn’t derived with the aid of a computerized dictionary search, which explains why it was seven years in the making. While there may still be some readers who find this an insufficient pretext to justify even these few large-margined pages, they’d be remiss in overlooking them. Given the considerable historical body of experimental literature that gives a context to this work—Georges Perec and the Oulipo can’t go unmentioned—its premise is no more of a gimmick than a plot where boy meets girl. Even the least felicitous of Bök’s sentences has appeal as something no one will ever read under any other circumstances, and the best build on each other until they convince the reader that all other kinds of writing are anarchy. The quality of this work is so high that it’s a shame to focus solely on its form; it deserves a perversely oblivious critic blind to its technical achievements. Maybe it’s only years from now, when we’ve all been inspired to try our hand at linguistic gymnastics like these, that Bök’s language and the time he’s spent “divining its implicit tricksâ€? will truly be appreciated.