SOURCE: "E-less in Gaza," in The London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 21, November 10, 1994, p. 6.

In the following review, Sturrock favorably compares Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatical translation of La Disparition to Perec's original French text.

We hear a lot about floating signifiers and how they bob anchorless around on the deep waters of meaning; we hear too little about sinking signifiers, or language items that have stopped bobbing and been sent silently to the bottom, if not for the duration then at least provisionally, while we see how well we can do without them. To scuttle a signifier in this way is to play at lipograms, an elementary language game that has been around for two and a half millennia. This lipo has nothing to do with fat, or with the world of the liposuctionist's hoover: it comes from a Greek verb meaning to 'leave out'. The lipogram is a...