The second installment in Roubaud’s popular and widely acclaimed “Hortense” series opens with a murder of a dog at the Church of Sainte-Gudule. Chief Inspector Blognard and his sidekick Arapède are on the scene, as is our narrator, Jacques Roubaud. While they track down the Poldevian criminal, teenage girls argue the relative merits of the boy bands Dew-Pon, Dew-Val, and Landau Valley, Père Sinouls tries to program a computer to take his place at the organ so that he can continue to practice Beeranalysis, and the clientele of the Gudule Bar debate the reality of Infinity.Time is running out for the Inspector, however, as the murderer puts into action his plot to kidnap our heroine Hortense, a 22-year-old philosophy student whose buttocks are so beautiful their description has been banned from the printed page.

Hortense is Abducted

Literature & Fiction

Roubaud, Jacques

Contemporary

Dalkey Archive Press

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud’s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem (“Nothing”), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud―poet, novelist, mathematician―composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind’s failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past (“I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell”). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him (“But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly”). While acknowledging “death calls for a poetry of meditation,” Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection―the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in―becomes a “memory infinitely torturous.” And his most anguished recollection is of their making love (“These memories are the darkest of all”), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death (“I did not save you from that difficult night”). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death’s harsh presence (“This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death”) and in its acceptance of the mind’s limitations (“I do not understand”). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud’s wife in 1980 entitled “If Some Thing Black.”

Some Thing Black

Poetry

“I’ve devoted myself to the enterprise of destroying my memory . . . I set fire to it, and with its debris I charcoal-scrawl the paper.” Part novel and part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of the last fifty years. At various times exasperating, daunting, moving, dazzling, and challenging, it has its origins in Jacques Roubaud’s attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives meaning to every page. Having failed to write his intended novel (“The Great Fire of London”), instead he creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process, which is at once an attempt to bring order to his ravaged personal life and to construct an intricate literary project that functions according to strict rules, one of them being the palindrome. But rather than a confessional novel about himself and his wife, Roubaud follows in the tradition of the troubadours, where the objects of grief and love are identified obliquely and through literary artifice. At all times, Alix and his anguished loss of her are paramount, but usually couched or disguised by the writer’s obsessive need to filter that anguish through reflections of the art of writing. The Great Fire of London consists of a main text (“story”) and two sets of digressions (“interpolations” and “bifurcations”). Although best to read the insertions as they appear (indicated in the main text with cross-reference markers), this is an interactive text in which readers can decide for themselves how they wish to proceed. Roubaud’s novel stands as a lyrical counterpart of those great postmodern masterpieces by fellow Oulipians Georges Perec (Life: A User’s Manual) and Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler). “Roubaud has finally produced a book that his great and varied talent had always promised…a beautifully controlled examination of the effect on him of his wife’s death and of the failure of his literary ambitions” – The Independent “For 20 years, the anguished narrator has wanted to write the non-novel we are now reading – it was once called Project, as Finnegans Wake was once called Work in Progress. He begins by writing the first sentence and then about how the first sentence looks on the page, the fall of light from his desk lamp on the sentence, the breaking darkness outdoors slowly wiping out the yellow lampglow on his desk, and so on, all with the intention of giving us a story that, as it goes along, self-destructs sentence by sentence. Can this be authorial suicide?” – Kirkus Reviews

Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations

United States

Part novel and part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of the last fifty years. At various times exasperating, daunting, moving, dazzling, and challenging, it has its origins in Jacques Roubaud's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives meaning to every page. Having failed to write his intended novel ("The Great Fire of London"), instead he creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process, which is at once an attempt to bring order to his ravaged personal life and to construct an intricate literary project that functions according to strict rules, one of them being the palindrome. But rather than a confessional novel about himself and his wife, Roubaud follows in the tradition of the troubadours, where the objects of grief and love are identified obliquely and through literary artifice. At all times, Alix and his angui

The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations

Jacques, Roubaud

Literary

Set to marry Gormanskoï, the Premier Prince Presumptive, our beautiful heroine Hortense has been exiled to Queneau’stown, where she finds herself in a real-life production of Hamlet―or is it Hatmel, the original Poldevian tale scandalously plagiarized by that Englishman William Shahkayspear? Something is definitely amiss in the Poldevian Principalities, and if her loyal friends can’t rescue her or foil the plagiarized plots of her evil twin, she may require intervention from the Author and Publisher―those unlikely cohorts responsible for bringing this deftly satiric, madcap adventure to light. Brimming with literary allusions, philosophical conundrums, witty interjections, and (of course) cats, Hortense in Exile is the third installment in the altogether delightful and hilarious “Hortense Series” by French novelist and mathematician Jacques Roubaud. Combining high literary sentiments with mathematical games, brilliant wordplay and an effusive sense of humor, Roubaud’s works are some of the most enjoyable in all of contemporary literature, and he is considered to be one of the most accomplished members of Oulipo (the workshop for experimental literature founded by Raymond Queneau and including such figures as Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, and Italo Calvino).

Hortense in Exile

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud’s delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara―to name only a few. (Even the Sun has a speaking role.) There are dramatic abductions, daring rescues, passages in hitherto untranscribed languages (Dog, Grasshopper, Duck), tales of unrequited love, allegorical interludes, poems, a playlet, and much more. (But no suspenders, the author promises.) Finally, there are 79 questions for readers of the novel, to see how closely they’ve been paying attention―for ultimately The Princess Hoppy is a giddy inquiry into how we read literary works. It is both an old-fashioned tale and an ultramodern hypertext, the oldest and the latest thing in fiction.

Princess Hoppy, Or, the Tale of Labrador: Or, the Tale of Labrador

This collection of prose and poetry elaborates on themes explored in Roubaud’s Some Thing Black, which the Times Literary Supplement called “a harrowing book . . . an elegy for our time.” As in the earlier collection, Roubaud grapples with the grief he continues to feel at the untimely death of his young wife. In parts 1 and 2, he uses the possible existence of many worlds as a means by which to transcend the trauma of this unbearable loss. (David Lewis’s book On the Plurality of Worlds provided the inspiration and title for Roubaud’s book.) These poems also rage against the limitations of poetry itself, which can only clarify the exactness of his grief, not assuage it. In part 3, Roubaud uses a mathematically precise form to explore the idea of form. As a meditation on both grief and on poetry, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis is a memorable achievement.

Plurality of Worlds of Lewis (French Literature Series)

Written in the years following the sudden death of Roubaud's wife, Some Thing Black is a profound and moving transcription of loss, mourning, grief, and the attempts to face honestly and live with the consequences of death, the ever-present not-there-ness of the person who was/is loved.

-- First paperback edition. -- Hortense is in trouble again. Set to marry the Premier Prince Presumptive, our heroine finds herself caught in the middle of the plot of Hamlet, playing the unfortunate role of Ophelia. Can she escape in time? Brimming with brilliant wordplay, mathematical equations, literary allusions, and cats, Hortense in Exile continues the Hortense series in grand style. -- Jacques Roubaud is president of the l'Association Georges Perec, a society dedicated to honoring the work of his fellow Oulipian. -- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1992).

Hortense in Exile (French Literature)

-- First paperback edition. -- In this madcap metafictional mystery a 22-year-old philosophy student (Hortense) is kidnapped and a dog is murdered -- the imaginary country of Poldevia is somehow involved. Arranged in the form of a sestina (replete with authorial asides and plenty of puns, jokes and wordplay), this is the second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed Hortense series. -- A professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a long time member of Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, Jacques Roubaud is the author of several novels and works of poetry. -- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1989).

Hortense is Abducted (French Literature)

Di Bernardi, Dominic

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roubaud, Jacques. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roubaud, Jacques

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roubaud, Jacques. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hortense is Abducted

Some Thing Black

Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations

The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations

Hortense in Exile

Princess Hoppy, Or, the Tale of Labrador: Or, the Tale of Labrador

Plurality of Worlds of Lewis (French Literature Series)

Some Thing Black

Hortense in Exile (French Literature)

Hortense is Abducted (French Literature)