#oulipo

Huh. Good question... 🤔

As a matter of fact, I've found a lot of very weird books just incidentally as part of my research. I might have to actually break this up into a whole series of posts...

Here, let's start with one very specific category:

𓊈 Weird French Books 🇫🇷 𓊉

The French have a particularly long and illustrious history of very weird books, including the weird literary movements of Lettrism and Oulipo. So what the hell, lets start with some Weird French Books:

Livre de Prières (1886) aka "Book of Prayers" by J. Hervier, J. A. Henry, and A. Roux

Huh, this just looks like a normal prayer book... What's so special about it? Heh, well buckle up. Strap in. Shit's about to get crazy.

Because this book is not printed, and it's not handwritten either. The pages of this book are made of woven silk. The creators used a precursor to modern computers, the extremely complex, Victorian Era programmable Jacquard loom, in order to literally weave the threads into the intricate pattern of text and illustrations. This was unimaginably difficult, and required many thousands of punchcards to be meticulously punched by hand. It is a literally insane the amount of effort for what I believe amounted to only... something like 50 copies of the book.

You can examine the whole thing HERE

Le Livre (1984) aka "The Book" by Pierre Guyotat

Guyotat is revered by academics in France, and his writing style was always extremely unique and bizarre. For instance, his book Éden, Éden, Éden (1970) is a litany of obscenities, written as a single, long, frantic, delirious run-on sentence. And let me be clear, THAT book seems absolutely mainstream and boring compared to Le Livre.

Le Livre isn't quite written in a separate invented language, it's more as if it was written in a rhythmic, polyphonic French that's been mutated and mutilated so drastically in morphology, syntax, sound, and typography that it becomes something alien. The style is aggressively broken up, sometimes described as being "riddled with apostrophes, as if they were sprayed from a machine gun." It's composed of chopped-up words, intentional misspellings, certain sounds missing or added, and contractions that can make it look almost unreadable, etc.

It's never been translated because that would be literally impossible. And I've never read it because I can't even read normal French, let alone whatever the fuck this is written in. Also it's strangely hard to find a copy of the book.

Composition n° 1 (1962) by Marc Saporta

Okay, the descriptions are getting too long. I'll try to keep them more compact from here on out:

This "book" is one hundred and fifty loose pages, which the reader is instructed to shuffle and then read in whatever order they land in.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) aka "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau

A "book" designed as a sort of... poem-generating machine?

It is only ten pages long, consisting of ten different sonnets, using the same rhyme scheme. Kind of. But each line of the poem is cut into a thin strip. This allows you to mix and match the different lines in order to make 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) different sonnets.

La Disparition and Les Revenentes (1969) aka "A Void" and "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" by Georges Perec

The first book is written to not use the letter "e" at any point. And the second book is written using "e" as the ONLY vowel. I cannot stress how difficult and frustrating these would have been to write.

Even more baffling was that both books were somehow translated into English so that the translations ALSO avoid the letter "e", and exclusively use the letter "e" for vowels, respectively.

I know that the first book also also has a rather clever premise where the sudden disappearance of the letter "e" from the world becomes a central mystery in the book.

Les Journaux des dieux (1950) aka "The Journals of the Gods" by Isidore Isou

Bro, I don't even know wtf this shit is.

The book mixes words, letters, drawings, diagrams, musical notation, mathematical signs, and blocks of color layered on top of one another, in an attempt to unite many different systems of communication inside one book.

«No. 1153. Détail d'un tableau de 'Suites naturelles' par Raymond Queneau.», in Raymond Queneau plus intime [catalogue par Jean-Pierre Dauphin], (exhibition catalogue), Bibliothèque nationale / Gallimard, Paris, April 1978, p. 75 [Département Manuscrits, C-1364, Bibliothèque nationale de France]

Book club last night.

Every other month our book club has a round table where instead of discussing a selected common book, we each talk about a book we have read. Most (but not all!) are recent publications popular on GoodReads or TikTok (shudder).

I brought one of my favorites, from the Oulipo movement.

One of the round table rules is no spoilers. Fortunately this book has no plot, so no spoilers.

The host wants us to rate our books, and she was surprised I gave this five stars.

I originally wanted to discuss another of Perec’s books: Life a Users Manual, but I’ll need several months to prepare for that discussion.

This was a great introduction to Oulipo works and the constraints within.

I was asked to contribute a portrait of Georges Perec to the "Aufbau Literaturkalender 2026" (ISBN-10: 3351042620; ISBN-13: 978-3351042622). Another small success!