Bøger af Jacques Roubaud

-

Translation of: Le grand incendie de Londres.

I bogen, Looking Writing Reading Looking, går 26 internationale forfattere i dialog med kunstværker fra Louisianas Samling. Forfatterne åbner vores øjne for værkerne med deres særlige, poetiske blik. Igennem en bred vifte af litterære genrer som digt, essay, erindringer og noter viser bogens bidrag, hvor forskelligt man kan opleve kunst. Forfatterne er her læsere af kunstværket – og herfra kan vi selv læse videre. I kunsten og i litteraturen. Bogens bidragsydere er Georgi Gospodinov, Colm Tóibín, Claudia Rankine, Richard Ford, Peter Laugesen, Chris Kraus, Sjón, Anne Carson, Roxane Gay, CAConrad, Mariana Enriquez, Hiromi Itō, Delphine de Vigan, Domenico Starnone, Yoko Tawada, Jacques Roubaud, Gunnhild Øyehaug, Eileen Myles, Tomas Espedal, Christian Kracht, Guadalupe Nettel, Anne Waldman, Matias Faldbakken, Chigozie Obioma, Péter Nádas og Tahar Ben Jelloun. I bogen omtales blandt andet værker af Francis Bacon, Asger Jorn, Henry Heerup, Alicja Kwade og mange andre.

Comprised of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", this collection skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry. It contains a variety of forms and tones that work together to describe Paris, its people, its writers, its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.

-- 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).

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.

Brevity is the anodyne here for Roubaud's customary low-yielding high jinks (Hortense in Exile, etc.) in this postmodern, word-processor-in-cheek fairy-tale starring Hoppy, a Princess, and her dog, whose name cannot be given for security reasons. Plot summary would be exasperating, misleading, and irrelevant for a tale whose narrative structure most closely resembles that of a toccata and fugue. After a cute, leaden introduction ("Some Indications about What the Tale Says"), the first four chapters lay out a riddle-riddled world peopled by Hoppy and her Dog-speaking dog; her four kingly uncles - Imogene, Aligote, Babylas, and Eleonor (without the E) - who spend their time entertaining and plotting against each other; their queens; and such visitors as the black horseman and the Babylonian astronomer. After an interchapter warning that things are about to get dicier, the tale resets to start, changing and embroidering such details as the names of the kings and queens, the color of the horseman (purple, if you're keeping track), and the cosmology and geometrical configuration of the kingdom. A closing list of 79 questions, a dedication to the Princess, and two exhaustive but mercifully brief indexes conclude the farrago of Monty Python, Barthelme's Snow White, Through the Looking-Glass and "The Hunting of the Snark," the gospel according to John, and the "Mathematical Games" section of Scientific American. This savants' brew, full of jocosity though devoid of wit (it sounds like a lot more fun than it is), seems handsomely enough translated. "The usefulness of certain enigmas will thus only appear to the listener if he already has a fairly good grasp of the Tale or if he has sufficient patience to stay his drowsiness until he has occasion to be convinced of their need (or even to resolve them)." On this evidence, Joyce and Derrida have a lot to answer for. (Kirkus Reviews)

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.

I dette andet bind af serien 'Londons store brand' fortsætter Roubaud det, han kalder sin “erindringsprosa” og fortæller – lærd og let, dybsindigt og dog humoristisk – om sin egen barndom, særlig årene under anden verdenskrig, præget af afsavn og en for barnet ubestemmelig uhygge.