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Christian Bök

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Eunoia: The Upgraded Edition Kindle Edition

by Christian Bök (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 131 ratings

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Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002)

Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram.

The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de LittÃ©rature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapteris a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!).

Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008.

This new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bok and an expanded afterword.

'Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' —Samuel Delany

'Eunoia takes the lipogram and rendersit obsolete.' —Kenneth Goldsmith

'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' —Harry Mathews

'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' —Charles Bernstein

'BÃ¶k's dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.' —The Times

'A resounding success ... brilliant.' —The Guardian

'Brilliant ... beautiful and strange.' —Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

'Impressive.' —Sunday Telegraph

'No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it's an ingenious little novel ... playful and irreverent ... charming.' —Metro

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic?" Besides being glib and chic, Bok's new book strikes one with the force of being the most incredible literary curio: each of its chapters is allowed to use only one vowel outgunning even Georges Perec's famed La Disparition, which simply omits the letter "e." Apparently seven years in the making, Eunoia, the shortest word in the English language to employ all the vowels (it means "beautiful thinking"), also employs other, more mundane constraints on paragraph length (all are 12 lines long) and what must be mentioned (the act of writing, nautical travel, energetic eating). This hyper-mechanization of the writer's craft sets the stage for a welter of eccentric, yet universally appealing, tours-de-force, such as Chapter E's retelling of the Illiad from the viewpoint of Helen: "Whenever Helen seeks these perverse excesses, her regretted deeds depress her; hence, Helen beseeches Ceres (the blessed Demeter): `let sweet Lethe bless me, lest these recent events be rememberd' then the empress feeds herself fermented hempseed, her preferred nepenthe." In the "u" chapter, "Dutch smut churns up blushful succubus lusts," and Ubu and Lulu burp, hump and bump for five delirious pages, exhausting, in the meantime, the entire range of English words that only contain the vowel. Eunoia's reductorial neurosis as euphonically zestful contrivance turns formidable stunts to imp's play. That is, this terrific book makes sense on its own terms. (Nov.)Forecast: Bok's debut Crystallography was well reviewed in Canada (Bok lives and works in Toronto, whence Coach House publishes), and he has invented languages for two Gene Roddenberry TV series, Earth: Final Conflict and Amazon. This book will have to be sought out, but it is beautifully produced, and browsers will be hooked.

Review

"Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane" -- Samuel R. Delany

"A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes." -- Harry Mathews

"The writing is musical, bawdy, and ingenious...Bök has crafted storylines [that are] a delight to read." -- Devin Crawley, Quill and Quire, October, 2001

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005GEZ2C6
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Coach House Books; Second Edition, The Upgraded (October 14, 2005)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 14, 2005
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 146 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 121 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,352,623 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #328 in Canadian Poetry
- #711 in Contemporary Poetry
- #1,398 in American Poetry (Kindle Store)

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4.5 131 ratings

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Christian Bök

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Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a ’pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His book Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and is the best-selling Canadian poetry book of all time. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at Charles Darwin University.

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An elderly reader

Clever and Funny Experimental Writing

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2019

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I have taught this book on several occasions. The word play is often breath taking. Here's an interesting incident from the first time I taught the book to a graduate class in English: I'd assigned it, and we were due to discuss it that afternoon. So I asked them, "Well, what did you think of it?" Nobody raised a hand. "Oh, come on," I said. "DId you all get to read it?"
They all nodded and looked dour.
"Oh, come on," I said. "Here, let me read it some of it to you." And I began to read them the text from the relatively short pages. "Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and and scrawls an alpha . . ." When I'd gone on for two pages, one of my brightest students raised his and so I looked up from the book and answered him with raised eyebrows. "Yes . . .?"
Very gravely the young man said, "You didn't tell us it was funny . . . !"
I was very surprised that you had to tell someone that, but some works—such as Finnegans Wake—are basically verbally playful, and when the reader can catch the voice, become highly enjoyable.
Get this book and read it—preferably out loud. You will have fun!

4 people found this helpful

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Teresa L Morgan

Fun book

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2021

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I heard about this, read parts online, wanted to check it all out. Definitely an interesting experience in constrained writing. Fun stuff.

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Travis Cottreau

I have a strong appreciation for Bok

Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2013

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Christian Bok is amazing. I've never seen a lucid narrative so densely packed with sound and rhythm.

As an example, from "Chapter E": "When Helen feels these stresses, she trembles. She frets. Her helplessness vexes her. She feels depressed (even when her cleverest beekeepers fetch her the freshest sweets)." etc... this goes on for a long, long time. NOTE: each word in "Chapter E" is restricted to only using the vowel E. The same is true for all the vowels. E, A, I and O are interesting narratives. Not much is said, but each tells a story. However, U is just weird, and much more difficult.

I see this book as an amazing, nearly genius level display of skill and talent, a true monument of intellect.

While I expected each vowel (from listening to Christian Bok on youtube), I didn't know there were extra pieces, including some translation of Arthur Rimbaud from the French, some poems FOR Rimbaud, and other tidbits.. none of which is as interesting as the vowel chapters.

While, there is lots to say about this amazing, titanic work, another thing has to be said - I don't like it that much. I can appreciate the work. I can marvel at the effort involved and what it is doing. At the same time, listening to it and reading it just isn't that fun or enjoyable. I can still recommend it - it is something that people who read and enjoy poetry should experience.

5 people found this helpful

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Henry Jacob Bruton

One Good Experience.

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2015

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BOOM! Thats the sound of my mind exploding. How does Christian Bok even create something this powerful in the first place. If you haven't given it a chance now is the time. Perfect for helping you questions the English language, societies understanding and your own ability to communicate. Once you have read this you will want other copies to hand out to friends, house guests, and strangers.

Thank you Christian Bok.

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2021

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Surprising, amazing, enjoyable.

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2020

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Bok’s book blossoms. Bok, no moron, croons cool words, not comforts or good odors.

11 people found this helpful

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maraf

Truly Unique

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2013

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If someone told me you could write an entire chapter using any consonants, but only a single vowel, I wouldn't have believed it. The author achieves this brilliantly, writing five chapters in verse--each focused on words containing only a, e, i, o, or u. You might expect jibberish, but the result is magically coherent and entertaining.

2 people found this helpful

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pescador

This is a beautiful feat.

Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2014

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Yeah seriously: how can you buy this book and not give it 5 stars? I have the hardcover, and it's a beautifully printed book. As for the contents, just try to outplay Mr. Bok at his own game. Great stuff.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Martin Ellis

Enjoyable Book For Wordies

Reviewed in Canada on March 4, 2024

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If you love words this book is a hoot. Kudos to the writer.

Human Being

Outstanding, amazing, mindblowing - a real work of art

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2013

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I utterly adore this book. Christian Bök's Eunoia is a playful example of what you can do with and without each of our five vowels. Each vowel has its own chapter, in which it has a starring role - in that no other vowel appears. At all. A univocal lipogram. You might think that this would result in a short or nonsense book. Not at all - there are genuinely 69 pages of this, before the final section (OISEAU) with some shorter riffs on the theme of alphabetic constraints.

`Eunoia' is a beautiful word. It is English, and it means `beautiful thinking'. This is indeed beautiful thinking, but neatly the word is also the shortest English one to contain all five vowels. You'll understand then the French title for the second part of the book - which is actually a tribute to the Oulipo tradition it owes so much to.

If restricting yourself to only using one vowel sounds like too much hard work, you may be surprised that this was not the only constraint. Here are the subsidiary rules:

"All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord and tumulus). The text must minimise repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed."

It's like the Ultimate Alphabet in verse - and it's amazing. You must read it.

Colton Boxell

Eunoia Product Review

Reviewed in Canada on September 24, 2019

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Good read, timely delivery, thank you!

B. G. Strand

LEXICAL SEMANTICS an exercise in syllabic nuclei

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2019

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E u n o I a ,the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels.Here in this short book ,combined with appropriate consonants, to provide inventive short prose offerings of each, in an exercise in lexical semantics .Technically a form of univocalic ( a type of lipogrammatic constrained writing ) after the style pioneered by C.C.Boombaugh the 19th century inventor of similar poetics.
Very original writing, of interest to all with poetic inclinations .

Mac McAleer

Word games with vowels

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2020

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This is an exercise in Oulipo (1), writing under pre-defined constraints. If you have already been exposed to writings associated with Oulipo, this will be of interest. Otherwise, this book may be a little bemusing at first.

THE BOOK is unequally divided into two sections: EUNOIA (2) and OISEAU (3). Eunoia is 72 pages long and is split into chapters A, E, I, O and U (4). Oiseau is 19 pages long. It contains a set of other Oulipo constraints. At the end of the book (page 103) is a short section “The New Ennui”. I would suggest starting there, as it gives an explanation of what the book is about.

EUNOIA is an exercise in writing using only one vowel (5). The five chapters in Eunoia are of varying length, presumably because some of the chapters have more words available to them than others. Each page is a single paragraph sitting in the middle of a page surrounded by generous white space. Each chapter has the same constraints. The most obvious constraint is that only the vowel mentioned in the chapter title can be used. Other constraints include that the text should allude to the art of writing, describe a banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. Another constraint is to try and exhaust the lexicon for each vowel. The letter y cannot be used. Thus every chapter contains a page that describes a prurient debauch, some more debauched than others. This may be offensive to some readers and some of the words would not get past the word checker used by Amazon for reviews.

OISEAU contains other writings using other constraints. "And sometimes" lists English words containing only consonants; "Vowels" is anagrammatic text permutating every letter of the word vowels; "Voile" is a homophonic translation of "Voyelle" by Arthur Rimbaud; "W" is an elegy for the letter W; "Emended Excess" exhausts vocabulary unsuitable for use in the retelling of the Iliad. Emended Excess" is 6 pages long and only contains the vowel e. Thus, it is an extension to Chapter E, which is mostly based on Helen and the Iliad.

EXAMPLES

Chapter A: "Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash - a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank. Hassan acts fast, ransacks cash bags at a mad dash, and grabs what bank drafts a bank branch at Casblanca can cash: marks, rands and bahts. Hassan asks that an adman draft a want ad that can hawk what canvas art Hassan has (a Cranach, a Cassatt and a Chagall). Hassan can fast-talk a chap at a watchstand and pawn a small watch that has, as a watchglass, a star padparadschah (half a grand, a carat). A shah can pack a bag, flag a cab and scram, catch-as-catch-can." (The 12th page of Chapter A)

Chapter E: “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters. We see the revered exegete reject metred verse: the sestet, the tercet – even les scènes élevées en grec. He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes – even les belles lettres en vers. He prefers the perverse French esthetes: Verne, Péret, Genet, Perec – hence he pens fervent screeds, then enters the street, where he sells these letterpress newsletters, three cents per sheet. He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms.” (The first page of Chapter E)

Chapter I: “Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks – impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib! Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing shtick which might instil priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz – griping whilst critizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.” (The first page of Chapter I)

Chapter O: “Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books. Books form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold book worms. Profs from Oxford show frosh who do postdocs how to gloss works of Wordsworth. Dons who work for proctors or provosts do not fob off school to work on crosswords, nor do dons go off to dorm rooms to loll on cots. Dons go crosstown to look for bookshops known to stock lots of top-notch goods: cookbooks, workbooks – room on room of how-to books for jocks (how to jog, how to box), books on pro sports: golf or polo. Old colophons on schoolbooks from school rooms sport two sorts of logo: oblong whorls, rococo scrolls – both on worn morocco,” (The first page of Chapter O)

Chapter U: “Gulls churl: ululu, ululu. Ducks cluck. Bulls plus bucks run thru buckbush; thus dun burrs clutch for tufts. Ursus cubs plus Lupus pups hunt skunks. Curs skulk (such mutts lurk: ruff, ruff). Gnus munch kudzu. Lush shrubs bud; thus church nuns pluck uncut mums. Bugs hum: buzz, buzz. Dull susurrus gusts murmur hushful, humdrum murmurs: hush, hush. Dusk suns blush. Surf lulls us. Such scuds hurl up cumulus suds (Sturm und Druck) – furls unfurl: rush, rush; curls uncurl: gush, gush. Such tumult upturns unsunk hulls; thus gulfs crush us, gulp, dunk us – burst lungs succumb.” (The 5th page of Chapter U)

_____________________________________________________________________________________
(1) Oulipo, or OuLiPo is short for “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle”. This roughly translates as "Workshop of potential literature". It was formed in 1960 in Paris by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and is best thought of as writing that is constrained by arbitrary rules. Strictly speaking, this is Noulipo, standing for North American Oulipo.
(2) Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels. It means beautiful thinking.
(3) Oiseau (bird) is the shortest word in French containing all five vowels. The author, Christian Bök, is based in Toronto and the use of the French word may be a reference to the French origins of Oulipo or Canadian bi-lingualism, or both.
(4) The chapters vary in length. This may reflect the varying sizes of the lexicons available for each vowel. For example, that there are fewer words containing only the vowel u than the other vowels. The chapter lengths are: Chapter A 19 pages; Chapter E 19 pages; Chapter I 9 pages; Chapter O 18 pages; Chapter U 5 pages.
(5) A lipogram is text written without the use of one or more letters. A variation of this is monovocalism, where the text uses only one vowel, a lipogram in all the other vowels. Eunoia is an example of monovocalism.

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