Putdownable

In Competition 2842 you were invited to compose the most off-putting book blurb that you could muster. There’s just space to say that I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy Jonathan Friday’s ‘groundbreaking exploration of the neglected beauty of bodily fluids and excreta’, which features ‘a striking array of scratch’n’sniff imagery’. G.M. Davis, nabs £30. The rest take £25.

Like Ernest Vincent Wright and Georges Perec, Guillermo Pozoverde has written a lipogrammatic novel, an extreme one. While the earlier authors gave themselves a relatively straightforward task by omitting only the letter ‘e’, he dispenses with ‘u’, ‘s’ and ‘a’ as a protest against America’s aggressive world role. Yet this is situationist aesthetics with a twist. Instead of using only words that do not use the banned letters, Pozoverde simply omits them from words that would normally contain them. Thus Brussels becomes ‘Brel’, vagina ‘vgin’. Inevitably, there are many instances of ambiguity thrown up by this method, and therefore constant exciting opportunities for readers to be active in the creative process, deconstructing the rules that have held back their understanding of art.