"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 ...
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"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
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Add this copy of Great Fire of London: a Story With Interpolations and to cart. $50.00, very good condition, Sold by Chaparral Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Portland, OR, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Dalkey Archive Press.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good in Very Good jacket. Size: 6x1x9; The binding is tight, corners sharp. Text unmarked. A touch of foxing on the fore edge of the text block. The dust jacket shows some light handling, in a mylar cover. 8vo. 330pp.
Add this copy of Great Fire of London: a Story With Interpolations and to cart. $50.33, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Dalkey Archive Press.
Add this copy of Great Fire of London: a Story With Interpolations and to cart. $60.00, very good condition, Sold by Studio Books Oregon rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Corvallis, OR, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Dalkey Archive Press.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. Brown cloth, octavo. 330 pages. Translated from the French and with an afterword by Dominic di Bernardi. Small black mark to top edge, near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket.
Add this copy of Great Fire of London: a Story With Interpolations and to cart. $87.58, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Dalkey Archive Press.
Add this copy of Great Fire of London: a Story With Interpolations and to cart. $101.40, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Dalkey Archive Press.
