Which great French novelist was also a crossword-setter?

One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration of the Tomatotropic organisation in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranico L)’ included in a scientific festschrift at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique? (The article charted the ‘yelling reaction’ — YR —of singers pelted with ‘Tomato rungisia vulgaris’.) And which French novelist wrote the world’s longest palindrome (5,566 letters)?

Perec would have enjoyed being the subject of a quiz, though, to do him full justice, the questions ought to have been cryptic: he was a crossword-setter as well as a novelist. His works are notoriously structured around puzzles and linguistically fraught with anagrams, puns and word games of all kinds. His most notorious novel, La Disparition, is a lipogram — a text in which one letter does not appear. The missing letter is ‘e’, and the novel is a bravura exercise, brilliantly translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void.

At this point, I imagine many readers will decide that Perec is not for them. He undoubtedly attracts terms like ‘ludic’, ‘post-modern’ and ‘metafictional’; and even his beard and hair seem to scorn social realism, looking as unreal as Wooly Willy’s clumps of magnetised iron filings.

But he is deeply engaging. The game-playing is not indulged in for its own show-off sake: the ‘void’ at the heart of La Disparition is profoundly human. Perec was Jewish; his father was killed in the war, his mother disappeared, taken to Auschwitz when he was six. It is a novel about the difficulty of remembering properly what is literally unspeakable: the universe of the novel is warped by absences. There can be no ‘mère’, no ‘père’, no ‘je’ and no ‘Perec’.

I have always wished that I had been able to read A Void with the innocence of its first reviewers, unaware of its lipogrammatic nature.