SOURCE: "E-free," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4475, October 7, 1996, p. 28.

Gunn favorably reviews Gilbert Adair's translation of A Void.

Reviewers of Gilbert Adair's splendid translation of Georges Perec's La Disparition find themselves—appropriately enough before a novel so concerned with contradiction and paradox, with "masking and unmasking"—at both an advantage and a disadvantage. They have an advantage over the reviewers of the 1969 French original, because they are spared the possible embarrassment of reading and then reviewing the book without noticing its structuring principle and implicit subject: the lack, throughout its 285 pages, of the letter e. They are at a disadvantage, however, because such embarrassment, and an accompanying fear or panic at the loss of face, leads to the heart of the novel—for such nagging anxieties are the characters' daily bread.

Yet even for forewarned readers—and the British publisher is making such forewarning a selling-point—there are...