ARAGO (Jacques).
Voyage Autour du Monde san la lettre a par Jacques Arago
A wonderful curiosity - more than a century before Perec and the OuliPo - Arago published this famous lipogram: as per its title, this brief account of the voyage is written entirely with out the use of the letter “a”. Arago himself confessed shortly before his death that there is, in fact, a single appearance of the letter a on page 27 in the word “serait”. The linguistic restriction results in several quirks, including the attribution of the discovery of the society Islands to Cook rather than Wallis. Arago was the official artist on Freycinet’s circumnavigation on the Uranie . Departing in 1817, Freycinet’s crew stopped at the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Shark Bay, New Guinea, Guam, Hawaii, Sydney, then passed Campbell Island en route to Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands, where the Uranie was shipwrecked. Arago collaborated on the official publication while composing his own account. He later became a prolific author and dramatist, composing works such as this and his hurous guide to the different eating habits around the world, Comme on Dine Partout. > Toussaint, Bibliography of Mauritius, D52.
