Book reviews: Eunoia

AT THIS time of year it's rather too easy to become despondent about the state of publishing. Admittedly, there is a small avalanche of celebrity memoirs, genre fiction with the author's name in index-finger sized embossed lettering and countless embarrassing novelty publications for the Christmas market – including, quite seriously, Doris Lessing's On Cats.

But despite the tsunami of ephemera, there are still genuine curiosities; books that challenge your expectations, subvert your preconceptions and expand the possibilities of what literature can do. Even the titles of these two wonderful books – Eunoia and Arioflotga – manage that kind of bookish double-take: neither reveals much about what you'll encounter, and both seem provocatively quirky and unusual.

Eunoia means "beautiful thinking" and has the honour of being the shortest word in the English language to have all five vowels. It's an apposite title for Bk's linguistically daring and delightfully inventive work. It begins "Awkward grammar appalls a craftsman", which, as you'll notice, only uses the letter "a". Each of the five chapters performs a similar feat: "Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech"; "Writing is inhibiting"; "Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books"; "Kultur spurns Ubu – thus Ubu pulls stunts".

Technically this baroque form is called "univocalics". Bk's work is also a lipogram – the letter "y" never occurs at all – and sets itself other strictures. Each chapter must include foods, drinks, drugs, ships, weapons, meditations on writing and so forth. None of which would be of any interest whatsoever if the result wasn't so engaging, witty and moving. Bk rewrites the Trojan War and riffs on the Arabian Nights; it is, stylistic pyrotechnics aside, a story.

Each letter develops its own character; rambunctious in "u", scherzo in "i". That's why omitting the "y" is so clever, as it would have legitimately introduced other vowel sounds without breaking the self-imposed rules.

That Frank Kuppner is not widely recognised as one of the most ingenious contemporary Scottish writers is a disgrace. From his surreal short stories (In The Beginning There Was Physics) to his haunting memoirs that combine investigations into true crime with meditations on personal loss (Something Very Like Murder and A Very Quiet Street) to his utterly idiosyncratic poetry – only Kuppner could call his selected poems What? Again? – he has consistently tested the limits of literary forms, literary tastes and literary norms.

Kuppner published a wonderful poem called 'First Lines Of Leo Hennigsdorfer' in Poetry Scotland several years ago. This new collection expands the conceit: the Great Poetic Anthology has been lost in cyberspace, but its index has turned up in a Latin American restaurant in Glasgow. The entire collection is first lines of lost poems: some ribald, some melancholy, some silly, some profound.

Kuppner has huge fun in this collection. Each line glimmers with possibilities, and simultaneously frustrates them all. There are, of course, parodies (having ruthlessly skewered TS Eliot in his previous collection, he seems to have it in for Gerard Manley Hopkins now, with lines such as "Wafer all-conquering, eclipsed biscuit, yea, Christ's crisp disc, whilk") and gleefully childish rewrites of great lines to include rude words. You can dip into it, but it rewards sustained reading.

There are little eddies, where the same line is repeated with variations, or corruptions, or emendations. The overall effect, especially when coupled with Kuppner's testy distrust of religious ideologies and poetic epiphanies, is of a book that systematically warns us against taking books too seriously.

As for the title: well, I'm stumped. Perhaps, like the inscrutable God he fulminates against so well, Kuppner has left a riddle that isn't supposed to be solved. But you won't read a more dazzling collection of aphorisms, elegies and wisecracks than Kuppner's Arioflotga.

Book reviews: Eunoia | Arioflotga