Abish's poetic prose rings true no matter how much, or how little, of the alphabet he has at his disposal. Beyond its linguistic experimentation, the first line of the novel hints at themes that may be explored in the story. At least it is meant to be, but all sorts of other things come up as well (while Alva proves particularly difficult to pin down).

Whoever owned it before me had some meaningful passages highlighted, so there's more going on in the book than a simple formal exercise.Throughout -- even as the book grows -- there is always the awareness that Africa is shrinking, vanishing. A recollection of a long-ago, idealized time known in his culture's history as " The Recess ," that " world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer . Not to mention the many "mistakes" he made in the writing, when he included words that began with, say, the letter "w" in chapter "D". Afterwards, only a missing word starting with a T or, towards the end of the book, an “I” make you notice the gimmick (and kind of take you out of the story, though I guess that doesn’t matter that much in this kind of book).

The first chapter "C" is an excellent example: it's really funny, and doesn't suffer, but also doesn't gain, by being constrained to words beginning with "a," "b," or "c. It took ridiculously long to finish and I don't think I got much out of it except for being impressed with the formula. Jedes neue Kapitel kann ein neues Wort er- oder verunmöglichen, greift jedenfalls in die Regeln des Diskurses ein. Because the beyond-horrific, indescribably inhumane images of the Holocaust, experienced through the eyes of a child, Elie Wiesel, remain forever.The solution is to use the character sound to effect the representation using a semicolon ‘;’ before the sound to create the character. Post modern way of creative writing, this way could inspire, but also, I feel my imagination is as well constrained. He spins cliché plots about dictators, spies, and murders, and he weaves in tourist impressions and fears, all in a kind of deadpan colloquial collage. Good lines: "But even invented countries follow a common need, as each country heads for a common memory, a common destiny, a common materiality. It's so innocuous a preposition that you don't even think about using it, but that innocuousness makes the challenge all the greater: he wasn't able to us "the" for 2/3 of the book!

True, it's mildly uncomfortable at first, at least to this reader, reading non-stop alliteration for two and three pages at a spell, but you get used to it eventually, and it feels natural, like watching sub-titles of some gorgeous foreign film and becoming so entranced by the movie that you no longer even notice the subtitles on the screen. Although this was very clever, and surprisingly easily read once you add some B and C words, the tale was not the thing. Maybe I'm strange, but I think it's hysterical that the first person narrator of Alphabetical Africa can't appear in his novel until chapter "I" and then must disappear after the apex of chapter "Z" has been reached and the novel, having lost access to the complete English alphabet pertaining to the first letters of words, backtracks from chapter "I" to chapter "H", where it's goodbye to the "I" first person narrator, and welcome back, "author".From the east and southeast, it is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, from the west by the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, much of the story takes place in Zanzibar, though that island can only be named in chapters 26 and 27. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll. The class was taught by the most eccentric and engaging genius of a professor I ever had, the late great, Dr. And Abish makes this very clear by presenting his novel with these odd constraints, finding that the words from an arbitrary section of the dictionary are no more or less capable of expressing what needs be expressed than all the words in the world.

It suggests a clash of cultures or individuals, as indicated by the "African amusement" and the subsequent description of an "African army" advancing against an "African anthill. Colorful Morocco is in the first place among the most popular travel spots in this part of the world, the second place belongs to South Africa, followed by Egypt and Tunisia.Once I found one mistake I tracked another 23 (mostly prepositions, why his editor didn't catch them or tell him is beyond me) over the course of the 152 pages, which is still astounding. One literally breathes easier as the chapters progress and the language is progressively less constrained.