La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (16 page)

La Boutique Obscure
is not a harder book for a translator than
A Void
, certainly, but neither is it altogether easier: intellectually, at least, it’s much more straightforward to recreate a novel without the letter E than it is to intuit the subconscious logic and illogic of a man who at one point in his life
chose
to write a novel without the letter E, and was even known to spend an evening here or there eliding it from conversation. But, again, Perec’s value isn’t about straightforwardness: it’s about the work he did to put his self into writing, and the work that we as readers get to do to extract it. In the best of his books, that work goes on well after the translation stops. I hope that’s the case here, and that it’s as much a labor of love for you as it was for me.