In the north it is separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, in the northeast, is separated from Asia by the Suez Canal and farther by the Red Sea. I'm not entirely sure what the story was about, except that it was some rather undefined travels through an unrealistic Africa. First story up for study is "Prima Belladonna" from 1956, a story originally collected in Vermillion Sands . Abish had produced a curiosity; it is well crafted, and worth discovering, but it is only as good as its limitation, nothing more. An African Alphabet is a vibrant ABC book that introduces babies and toddlers to the unique variety of animals found in Africa.

It uses the ‘;’, semicolon to resolve a problem and gets us away from having to use 3, ), c, when we could easily type ɛ, ɔ, ŋ. As it turns out, Abish didn't quite live up to his self-imposed constraint -- see our list of Alphabetical Errata. a b The capital Ɓ has the form of Ƃ in the original document, which is not the current standard form for capital for this letter in most languages but is still preferred for Dan and Kpelle in Liberia. Are we to read as Oulipeans for part of one sentence, and then forget that regimen, and think instead about the plot? Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them.It's so innocuous a preposition that you don't even think about using it, but that innocuousness makes the challenge all the greater: he wasn't able to us "the" for 2/3 of the book!

As for Africa, it’s essentially an imaginary place, perhaps chosen because all the Z’s are convenient. Auch für Laederachs Übersetzung darf gelten, was John Updike zum Erscheinen der Originalausgabe schrieb: ''Ein Meisterwerk seiner Art' scheint keine zu große Anerkennung zu sein für ein Buch, das wahrscheinlich das einzige seiner Art sein wird' - weshalb wir es in einer zweisprachigen Ausgabe auflegen. House of Leaves, for instance, has taken a ton of abuse for allegedly being a hollow shell of a novel whose shallowness is disguised by its carnival of textual formatting, though I disagree vehemently (as I digress) and believe the artifice of House of Leaves only enhances its uniquely imaginative artistry . Afrika ist ein beliebter Gegenstand der Literatur', sagt Abish, 'es erlaubt einen so gewaltigen Überfluss, dass es meine Imagination nährte, lange bevor ich meinen Fuß auf diesen Kontinent setzte.Great use of (necessary, at times) alliteration, the language is poetic, it's surprisingly dense at ~160 pages.