A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Dog...

Many times while reading A Void, it seemed more like a chore than something I was doing for fun, like it normally is when I read. But, maybe since I was technically reading it for school, maybe it was more of a chore. Strangely enough, it wasn’t the lack of “e” that made it hard to follow (in fact, that piece of it only seemed to matter for the first page or so), but the way the story would go off in seemingly random directions. In the beginning of the novel, Anton (the books protagonist) was going insane. During the night, Anton would lay on his rug, looking and searching within it’s pattern for what he described only as “abstract motif without any form at all, but for two Kandinskian diagonals, along with a matching pair, as half as long and slightly awry - fuzzy contours trying, if in vain, to draw a cartoon hand...”
However, as hard as it was to follow, I also found the seemingly meaningless twists and turns exciting and interesting to read. “a body crumpling up,” he described it, “a hoodlum, a portrait of an artist as a young dog; a bullock, a Bogartian falcon, a brooding blackbird; an arthritic old man; a sigh; or a giant grampus baiting Jonah, trapping Cain, haunting Ahab; all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of wisdom and authority which is now lost - now and, alas, for always - but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not abandon.”
Due to a lack of the letter “e”, the most common letter in the english language, the author is often forced to use very interesting syntax when writing. Words like “Me”, “The”, “Like”, or “Hello” can ever be used in the book, and the author is often forced to use alternative words, or very round-about ways of saying things.