Christine Brooke-Rose | English writer, 89

Christine Brooke-Rose, 89, an English experimental writer known for wielding words with the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others, died March 21.

Her death was announced on the website of her British publisher, Carcanet Press. Fittingly for a writer whose work could take artful pains to dispense with seemingly indispensable linguistic foundation stones (she once wrote an entire novel without using the verb "to be"), the "where" of Ms. Brooke-Rose's death - whether it occurred at her longtime home in the South of France or elsewhere - was unspecified.

The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, essays and criticism, Ms. Brooke-Rose was one of relatively few Britons to maintain a long association with experimental fiction. Her stylistic techniques - playful, polyglot, punning, postmodern and slyly self-referential - are more typically associated with writers of the French Nouveau Roman school.

Because she often used alternative narrative devices (including unorthodox chronology and unusual typography) to create alternative realities, her work is sometimes classified as science fiction, though much of it is beyond category. As with much postmodern fiction, her writing - organized around an unspoken compact between the author, who is unspooling the text, and the reader, who is watching it unspool - is about the act of writing itself.

Her best-known novels include four whose combined titles run to just five syllables - Out (1964), Such (1965), Between (1968), Thru (1975) - followed by a syllabic splurge: Amalgamemnon (1984), Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990) and Textermination.

Reared in Geneva, Brussels and Britain, the young Ms. Brooke-Rose worked at Bletchley Park during the war, decrypting intercepted German messages. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Oxford, followed by a doctorate in medieval literature from University College London. From the late 1960s to the late '80s she taught British and American literature at the University of Paris. - N.Y. Times News Service