![]() Oulipian antics include writing an entire novel without the letter ‘e’ describing the same happening in 99 different ways and recasting a poem by replacing each noun with another, seven nouns away in the dictionary. That friends and family draw fault lines across race and age-other ways in which the lovers differ-but never mention gender only deepens the sense that this particular non-biological binary is inconsequential.įourteen years after Sphinx’s publication, Garréta became the first female member of Oulipo, a French literary collective whose members are known for imposing constraints on their own writing to prompt creativity (the name is a portmanteau of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or the Workshop for Potential Literature). All the while, even though the characters who swirl around the lovers are assigned genders, it’s never made clear if je or A*** identify as male or female or something else. ![]() ![]() Across 120 pages, je pursues A***, their relationship crescendos and crumbles, and je struggles to come to terms with the loss by stringing together the very narrative the book comprises. In this underworld, je meets A***, an alluring African American dancer from Harlem who’s 10 years je’s senior and addicted to sex and television. ![]()
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