Paris, winter 1968–69. You are Georges Perec — and you are writing a 300-page novel without once using the most common letter in the French language.
Every E your typewriter refuses drifts out over the rooftops of Paris. Scene drawn entirely in code.
It is past midnight in a small Paris flat. Rain has rinsed the rooftops; a moth is bothering your lamp; your coffee went cold an hour ago. On the desk sits your typewriter — and if you look closely, you will see that one key has been pried right off. The E. You did that on purpose.
You are Georges Perec: 32 years old, a puzzle-lover with a wild beard and a wilder idea. In French, E is everywhere — about one letter in every seven. Write a page of French and it will be sprinkled with a hundred E's. Your plan is to write an entire detective novel — 300 pages — without a single one. No "le", no "et", no "elle". You cannot even type your own name: G-e-o-r-g-e-s P-e-r-e-c has four E's in it.
Your friends in a strange club called the Oulipo — the "Workshop of Potential Literature", founded in 1960 by a writer and a mathematician — believe that rules like this don't imprison a writer. They set the writer free. Tonight you will find out if that is true. And hidden inside the game is something you almost never talk about: the war took your father when you were four, and your mother was taken to Auschwitz when you were six. In French, the letter E sounds exactly like "eux" — "them". A book with no E is a book about the ones who are missing.
Type anything below — click the paper or use the round keys. Your machine simply has no E. Try to type your name, or "The letter e is everywhere". Every time you reach for the forbidden key, the machine jams and the letter escapes into the night sky above the rooftops.
Perec's genius wasn't avoiding E — it was still saying everything. Rewrite the sentence below so it keeps its meaning but never uses the forbidden letter. The detector is watching.
Your mission — say this, but legally:
Here is one of the most famous opening lines in English literature, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813). First, light up every E hiding in it. Then let them fall. Then watch the sentence be rebuilt, Perec-style — same meaning, zero E's.
E is not just any letter — it is the most common letter in English AND in French. Toggle between the two languages, then load a real chunk of Gadsby (1939), the American novel that did the same trick thirty years earlier: the page computes its letter counts live, right here in your browser. Find the crater where E should be.
The Gadsby bars are counted live from its public-domain opening pages. Ernest Vincent Wright tied down the E key of his typewriter so it could not betray him — 50,000+ words, published in 1939, the year he died. Perec tipped his hat by hiding a "Lord Gadsby V. Wright" inside La Disparition.
How do you translate a book whose whole point is a missing letter? You don't copy the letter — you copy the wound. Each translator banned whichever letter mattered most in their own language. Tap each book.
Seven questions. Answer them all and the Workshop of Potential Literature may consider your application.
In 1972 Perec wrote a second novella, Les Revenentes, using ONLY the vowel E — every E he had banished came flooding back at once. As if the letter had been waiting outside the door the whole time.
So here is the question to carry home: if losing one small letter changes everything you are allowed to say — what are the invisible rules already shaping what you say every day? And what might you discover if you broke one on purpose?