Lipogram - More Examples

More Examples

After Perec's work, many other authors have taken to write under these (or even stronger) constraints. To cite some examples:

• In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) the first chapter consists solely of words beginning with "A". Chapter two also permits words beginning with "B" and so on, until at chapter 26, Abish allows himself to use words beginning with any letter at all. For the next 25 chapters, he reverses the process.
• Gyles Brandreth re-wrote some of Shakespeare's works as lipograms: Hamlet without the letter "I" (e.g., "To be or not to be, that's the query"); Macbeth without "A" or "E"; Twelfth Night without "O" or "L"; Othello without "O". In 1985 he also wrote the following poem, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram (using every letter of the alphabet except "E").

Bold Nassan quits his caravan,
A hazy mountain grot to scan;
Climbs jaggy rocks to find his way,
Doth tax his sight, but far doth stray.

Not work of man, nor sport of child
Finds Nassan on this mazy wild;
Lax grow his joints, limbs toil in vain—
Poor wight! why didst thou quit that plain?

Vainly for succour Nassan calls;
Know, Zillah, that thy Nassan falls;
But prowling wolf and fox may joy
To quarry on thy Arab boy.

• In Christian Bök's novel Eunoia (2001), each chapter is restricted to a single vowel, missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain the letters "A", "E", "I" or "U". A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel has been called univocalic.
• Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), a book by Mike Schertzer (1998), pretends to have been written "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The poems that follow use only the 4 vowels "A", "E", "I", and "O", and 11 consonants "C", "D", "F", "H", "L", "M", "N", "R", "S", "T", and "W" of this utterance.
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (2001) is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country which begins to outlaw the use of various letters, and as each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (for the most part) no longer used in the text of the novel. It is not purely lipogrammatic, however, because the outlawed letters do appear in the text proper from time to time (the characters being penalized with banishment for their use) and when the plot requires a search for pangram sentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving as homophones for the omitted letters (i.e. "PH" in place of an "F", "G" in place of "C"), which some might argue is cheating.
• In Sweden a form of lipogram was developed out of necessity at the Linköping University. Because files were shared and moved between computer platforms where the internal representation of the characters "Å", "Ä", "Ö", "å", "ä", and "ö" (all moderately common vowels) were different, the tradition to write comments in source code without using those characters emerged. Some also used this as a pastime to write texts using this restriction.
• Eszperente is a lipogrammatic form of Hungarian in which no vowels can be used other than "E". This task is eased somewhat as "E" is a common vowel in Hungarian. In fact the letter e can denote two similar but distinct vowels. There are poems and even some books written in Eszperente, mostly for children.
• Zanzō ni Kuchibeni o (1989) by Yasutaka Tsutsui is a lipogrammatic novel in Japanese language. The first chapter is written without あ, and usable syllables are decreasing as the story advances. In the last chapter, the last syllable ん vanishes and the story is closed.
• Zero Degree (2001) by Charu Nivedita is a lipogrammatic novel in Tamil language. The entire novel is written without ஒரு, a word that is not possible to avoid in a novel, and there are no punctuation marks in the novel except dots. Later the novel was translated in English.
• Russian XVIII-century poet Gavriil Derzhavin avoided the harsh R sound (and the letter) in his poem "The Nightingale" in order to render the bird's singing.
• Russian author Sergei Dovlatov did not use two words that start with the same letter in a single sentence, inspired by Perec's experience.
• Argentinean folk singer Leon Gieco released a novelty song in 1997 called "Ojo con los Orozco" ("Be Aware of the Orozco Brothers") where he described the personalities and proclivities of eight fictional corrupt politicians, all brothers within the same family. The rap song is in Spanish, with a heavy dose of lunfardo, some English words, and a few pop culture references (among others, Don Johnson, Bon Scott, John Lennon and Yoko Ono are mentioned). Only the vowel O is featured in the song's lyrics; no other vowels are used. The song's video makes heavy use of surrealistic images.