The novel that banned itself a letter

In 1969, the Frenchman Georges Perec published La Disparition, a novel of some 300 pages written without the letter e — the most common letter in French. He wasn't the first: in 1939, the American Ernest Vincent Wright had done the same in English with Gadsby, around 50,000 words without an e.

The astonishing thing about Perec is that the result works as a novel: a mystery about a disappearance in which the missing thing is, secretly, the letter itself. Literary lore has it that at least one critic reviewed it without spotting the constraint.

The challenge carried on into translation: the English version, A Void, also avoids the e, while the Spanish one, El secuestro, sacrificed the a — Spanish's most common letter — instead.

And the punchline: years later Perec wrote another novel, Les Revenentes, using only one vowel. Which one? The e, of course.