Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel without the letter E
The most common letter in French, banned for an entire book — and the missing letter turns out to be the whole point.
In 1969, the French writer Georges Perec published La Disparition, a 300-page novel that never once uses the letter e — the most frequent letter in the French language, present in ordinary French prose roughly one word in six. Perec belonged to Oulipo, a group of writers who treated extreme formal constraints not as gimmicks but as engines: strip away a resource everyone assumes is necessary, and see what the sentence is forced to become instead.
The plot follows a search for a man named Anton Vowl, who has vanished — a joke embedded in the premise, since the missing letter is itself the book's structuring absence. Characters in the story occasionally sense that something is wrong with their world without being able to name it, which mirrors the reader's own experience of a text that feels subtly warped without always knowing why.
The constraint wasn't arbitrary for Perec personally. Scholars have connected the missing e to the words he could never write without it — père (father), mère (mother), parents, famille — and to his own history: his father died as a soldier and his mother was killed in the Holocaust when Perec was a child. A rule about which letters are permitted became a way of writing around a loss too large to name directly.
The book was translated into English in 1994 by Gilbert Adair, who performed the same trick in a second language, calling it A Void.