Hortense in Exile

by Jacques Roubaud

Book Overview

-- 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564782557
• ISBN13: 9781564782557
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Funny and Brainy

Roubaud is one of the few "Postmodernist" writers I can deeply enjoy. One reads the Americans in the canon -- T.C. Boyle, Pynchon, Delillo, et al. -- with a sort of obligatory admiration. The typical work is cleverly plotted, verbally proficient, and suitably "critical" of modern life -- but who cares?Roubaud employs the now standard tricks of the postmodernist: breaking the wall between reader and author, twitting convention, playing with our understandings of culture and media -- and he does so with a wink. This book is hilarious. One senses that his stripping away of all the pretenses of fiction leaves only the author, and that he's charming.