Perhaps this book was filled with too much genius for me. Or perhaps it's because I kept getting distracted by the fact that this book does not contain the letter "e" anywhere within it. But, on the whole, this book wasn't able to really capture my imagination.

Anton Vowl goes missing, and it is up to his friends and a pair of investigators to find him. In the course of looking for him, they discover that other people have died/gone missing in the course of a few months, and a full-on investigation is underway.

The third part of the novel was what really bogged my down in reading this: Augustus' tale, while very important to the storyline, seemed excessively long for no other reason than to prove that Perec could write a 400 page novel without the letter "e" (in the Afterword, also devoid of "e"s, Perec admits that he wrote this novel in response to a friend's challenge, who claimed writing without an "e" to be impossible).

Accolades to Perec for avoiding the "e", but this mystery was not for me.