The back cover gives a better summary than I could: “‘Eunoia,’ which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter.”
This is, as you might guess, both excellent and a little tedious, though more excellent than not. This book is visually really appealing: this edition’s printed on very nice cream paper, and the “chapters” are made up of paragraph-length bits of text that look/read like prose poems. It makes for pleasing shapes, these blocks of justified text on facing pages, and how your eye catches the fact that all the words all contain the same vowel: like this:
(You can actually read the whole book on the publisher’s website, but I’m glad I found the printed version at the library!)
It’s interesting to see how different the sections feel, how the tone changes in part because of the words available to use. In the first section, for example, which uses only As, we get lots of things like: “Hassan can ____”—you can’t have “Hassan watches” or “Hassan watched” so you get “Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash — a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank” (23). As opposed to the Es, where there is no “can,” only action: “Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps” (33). It’s also lots of fun to read sentences aloud (or, if you’re reading on the train like I was, to imagine reading sentences aloud), thinking of the different sounds an A or an E can make.
Plot-wise, the book is, in part, a retelling of the Iliad—ships and war and Helen of Troy—but I found I mostly preferred reading for sound and rhythm to reading for sense, appreciating sentences as sentences rather than as strings of a plot, sentences like: “She enters the deepest sleep — the nether sphere — where sleepers delve the deepest depths” (37). (Although I must admit, the two pages about the Trojan horse were really satisfying to read as a telling of something familiar, not just as words, and there were some descriptions I really liked, like this, of armor being hit by arrows: “the steel sheen gets etched, then dented” (45).) Elsewhere are some annoyingly self-referential moments, sentences like “A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (12), or “We sneer when we detect the clever scheme — the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer, we jest. We express resentment” (32), but I was (mostly) willing to just smile at those and move on. And besides, sometimes the self-referential bits really work, like in the “I” section, where there’s this great shift from the writerly-I to something more active: from “Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script” to “Irish tinsmiths, fiddling with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin whirring drillbits. I pitch in, fixing things. I rig this winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping” (51).
The other thing I really liked about this book, aside from the obvious sense of play, is that it contains lots of list-ish passages, and lots of exciting or satisfying or new-to-me words. By page 30 I had a whole list of words I wanted to look up, which made me think about how I’m pretty sure that the last book I read did not require me to look up a single word (though it did make me look up people and concepts I wanted to learn more about), which made me think about how much I like looking up words (as I sat at my desk before the workday started with a 1980-something edition of the Chambers Dictionary I snagged from a co-worker’s old cube after she left). I looked up “skald” and “cassabanana” and “czardas” and “cadastral” and “caracal” and “avadavat.” (And listed them all on wordnik.com. Mmm, words.)
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