Caroline Moore

Which great French novelist was also a crossword-setter?

Answer: Georges Perec. And it shows in his writing. A review of Portrait of a Man, by Georges Perec, translated and with an introduction by David Bellos

issue 15 November 2014

One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration of the Tomatotropic organisation in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranico L)’ included in a scientific festschrift at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique? (The article charted the ‘yelling reaction’ — YR —of singers pelted with ‘Tomato rungisia vulgaris’.) And which French novelist wrote the world’s longest palindrome (5,566 letters)?

Perec would have enjoyed being the subject of a quiz, though, to do him full justice, the questions ought to have been cryptic: he was a crossword-setter as well as a novelist. His works are notoriously structured around puzzles and linguistically fraught with anagrams, puns and word games of all kinds. His most notorious novel, La Disparition, is a lipogram — a text in which one letter does not appear. The missing letter is ‘e’, and the novel is a bravura exercise, brilliantly translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void.

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