This text is an excerpt of La Disparition (“The Disappearance”) by Georges Perec, one of the most prominent French novelists of the twentieth century. Perec’s parents died in a war camp. As the only souvenir and evidence of his mother’s death, he received from the French government a bureaucratic notification (“Acte de disparition”), stating that she was presumed dead or missing. Deeply harmed by this disappearance, he decided to write a novel in which the most important letter of the French language—the “e”—was missing…This absence would be later filled in les revenentes, a novel of 128 pages in which the only vowel he uses is the “e”…