Books by Jacques Roubaud
The Form of the City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart (French Literature)
Composed of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and partly a response to the poetry of Raymond Queneau, this collection explores Jacques Roubaud’s many poetic modes. He skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry without abandoning the melancholy playfulness that has defined his lengthy writing career. A selection of Roubaud’s best recent work, The Form of a City describes not only Paris, but also its people, its writers (and those of the Oulipo in particular), its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.
Copies
No copies available.
The Great Fire of London: Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations (French Literature)
Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author'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 Roubaud creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process. This novel stands as a lyrical counterpart of the great postmodern masterpieces by fellow Oulipians Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. First published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1991, now available again.
Copies
No copies available.
Loop (French Literature)
Devastated by the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but to continue living - writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, increasingly, to exist: that of Memory. The Loop finds Roubaud returning to his earliest recollections, as well as considering the nature of memory itself, and the process - both merciful and terrible - of forgetting. By turns playful and despairing, The Loop is a masterpiece of contemporary prose.
Copies
No copies available.
Mathematics: (French Literature)
Longtime Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud's homage to one of the great passions of his life: mathematics...
Copies
No copies available.
Sleep Preceded by Saying Poetry
by Cole Swensen, Jacques Roubaud
These restless poems meditate on sleep, night, darkness, and silence. And on sleeplessness, on waking up in the middle of the night, and on silence interrupted. Making tight loops and insistent returns, the words split and dissolve into silence, just as everything falls quiet and still, just as sleep begins to wash over you―when the light comes on, or the faucet drips, or a branch scratches the window. A slightly different pattern emerges as the words are reassembled, one with its own unique pattern of interruptions. Saying Poetry is a brilliant reflection on this state of distraction, which, Roubaud suggests, is essential to poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go
by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Lusson
An introduction to the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go by Oulipo members Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud
Written by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics.
As in the Oulipian strategy of writing under constraint, the role of structured gameplay (within literature and without) proves to be of primordial importance: a means of moving outside an inherent system, of instigating new figures of style and meaning, new paths toward collaboration and new strategies for filling a space: be it the space of a terrain, a blank page, a white screen or a freshly stretched canvas.
Translated for the first time, this treatise outlines the history of Go, the rules for playing it, some central tactics and strategies for playing it and overcoming the threats posed by an opponent, general information and trivia, and a glossary that ranges from Atari (check) to Yose (the end of a match).
Pierre Lusson (born 1950) is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France.
Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.”
Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of mathematics at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart and The Loop.
Copies
No copies available.
Peut-être ou La Nuit de dimanche (Autobiographie romanesque): (Brouillon de prose)
Product Description
Quand ma sœur est née, j'avais un peu moins de quatre ans. On me demanda si j'étais content. Je répondis (ai-je appris) que je m'étais déclaré content « d'avoir une tortue et une petite sœur ». Rien que d'assez banal. Quand mon plus jeune frère est né, le benjamin de notre famille, j'en fus, je m'en souviens, très heureux. C'était la nuit de la Saint-Jean de 1939. Il s'est suicidé en 1961. Il était le préféré, je pense, je pense avoir toujours pensé, de ma mère. Peut-être des autres membres de notre famille. Je ne sais pas. Comment faire ? Une solution, une seule : être un benjamin.Autobiographique est ce roman, ce brouillon de roman, donc, comme je viens de le décider ; de même tout roman est autobiographie de celui qui lui donne son nom. Écrire et publier son autobiographie n'a guère de sens. Pourquoi n'y en aurait-il qu'une ? Si on en composait une tous les dix ans, par exemple, ce serait déjà moins une prétention ridicule à transmettre au monde LA vérité sur soi-même. Toutes les autobiographies que je connais prétendent cela. Je n'ai pas le temps, je n'aurai pas le temps de tendre à l'excellence dans la composition de mon roman. Je sais qu'il faut, qu'il faudrait que les chapitres se suivent et ne se ressemblent pas, tout en étant confinés dans des dimensions raisonnables, peut-être préétablies par l'Auteur, qui cependant ne peut être ni Diderot, ni Stendhal, qui ne doit pas s'efforcer à jouer Monsieur de Chateaubriand ou Christine Angot, bien que parlant, comme eux, de moi et encore de moi. J. R.
About the Author
Jacques Roubaud est né en 1932 à Caluire, dans le Rhône. Il se définit lui-même comme compositeur en poésie et retraité en mathématiques. Il a publié de la poésie, de la prose, du théâtre et des écrits de théorie littéraire. Il est l'auteur de Poétique. Remarques, paru en 2016, dans « La Librairie du XXIe siècle ».
Copies
No copies available.
Le "grand incendie de londres"
En 1989 paraissait Le Grand Incendie de Londres, renommé ici La Destruction, première branche d’un « grand projet » plausiblement achevé, et dont les six titres constitutifs, tous parus dans la collection « Fiction & Cie », et enfin repris en un seul volume, 20 ans après la première pierre de cet édifice.Jacques Roubaud est un auteur mondialement reconnu. Plus de deux ans après la mort de sa jeune femme, Alix Cléo, il s’élançait dans cette grande œuvre où le fil autobiographique croise toutes sortes de considérations logiques, philosophiques, esthétiques : un regard sur l’époque et ses modes, sur le voyage, sur la fabrique du récit, sur la langue, ses jeux, son histoire, ses traductions. On y retrouve un homme, un poète, un mathématicien, attentif à ce qui l’entoure et aux mécanismes du sens. L’ensemble se compose donc de : La Destruction, La Boucle, Mathématique :, Impératif catégorique, Poésie :, La Bibliothèque de Warburg.Chaque volume est suivi d’un ou deux articles ou entretiens parus à sa sortie.
Copies
No copies available.
Princess Hoppy, Or, the Tale of Labrador: Or, the Tale of Labrador
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.
Copies
No copies available.