Hortense in Exile

By Jacques Roubaud

Book Overview

Set to marry Gormanskoi, 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)."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564780015
• ISBN13: 9781564780010
• Release Date: July 1992
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.8"

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.