A E I Owe You

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I was going to write this review entirely in the style of its subject: the eccentrically offbeat Eunoia; but in all honestly it would be more trouble than it’s worth. You’d probably lose your concentration and stop reading half way through. Here’s why:
The word from which this book takes its title is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels. From the Greek word for ‘beautiful thinking’, it’s an apt title, because it is indeed a beautiful thought. But that’s just the problem – as a concept it’s every writer’s wet dream, but in reality there’s something about it that just doesn’t quite work.
The main body of the book is divided into five chapters, in each of which author Christian Bök uses words that contain only one of the five vowels. It’s ambitious, and it works to a certain extent. Each of these chapters describes a banquet, some kind of lustful act, a pastoral scene and a nautical voyage in some way, and does not repeat any word bar connectives. It’s certainly an impressive feat, and took him seven years to write, which is in no small part why I dropped the idea of imitating him in this review – it’s not really the kind of spare time I have on my hands!
Of course, using as many words as possible that contain only one of the five vowels is limiting at best, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t always flow too well. I’m undecided as to whether it should be read as poetry or as narrative fiction, because although the language is beautifully constructed and displays certain rhythmic qualities, four characters inhabit the scenes, and each have a story: Hassan hatches a dark plan; Helen enters Hell’s deepest recesses; ‘I’ sighs, his writing stifling; and Ubu humps Ruth.
As a narrative piece, however, it has obstacles. Had I mimicked the mode of Eunoia and used only one vowel at a time, you would most likely have given up reading this review by now. It’s not so much because the flow is particularly jarring as a result, but more because you have to read it side-by-side with a dictionary. “Casbah”, “senescent”, “colophons” – whilst you can get the gist of what each word means from the context in which it is used, I found my enjoyment hampered somewhat in Bök’s work.
And when there is simply no word in English for what he wants to say, Bök resorts to alternative languages, which was aggravating no end. Perhaps I’m just bitter that my grasp of French and Latin is substandard at best, I don’t know. Admittedly it is clever, and appeals to the pretentious, fancy-word-loving poet in me, but as a rule I subscribe to the George Orwell, ‘if people won’t understand what the word means, use a different one’ school of thought – if no-one understands a word you’re saying, then what are you going to achieve?
The second half of the book is a collection of interesting little titbits along the same restrictive lines as the first five chapters, but less exhausting. ‘Vowels’, which uses only the letters of its title, beautifully sums up the rise and fall of love, ending on the fantastic image “so we love less well, so low, so level. Wolves evolve”. Various other pieces include a homophonic translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Voyelle, an elegy to the letter ‘w’, and the excess trimmed from Chapter E, which is a take on the Iliad.
Summarising the collection is an afterword by the author, which explains the concepts behind each piece – and which I think sums up my main problem with Eunoia as a whole. Reading is fun, and aside from learning, why else do people do it? That everything needs a sort of footnote is like the joke that needs explaining – you understand, but it isn’t really funny. Once he’s explained that each chapter uses only one vowel (okay, so this is obvious), and that he only uses each word once, and that he’s used ninety-eight percent of the words that use only one vowel available, and that each chapter describes the same things and so on and so forth, the book has lost its fun. I enjoyed the stories, and I applaud the concept, but needing to be shown its genius, and as such why it took seven years to write, kind of killed it for me. Sorry Christian...