The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations

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Dalkey Archive Press, Jun 29, 2016 - Fiction - 328 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Chain
33
Prae
55
Portrait of the Absent Artist
88
Dream Decision Project
108
Nothing Doing in London
175
from Chapter 1
195
from Chapter 2
205
from Chapter 3
212
from Chapter 5
241
from Chapter 6
263
Ornamental Hermit
279
A Boston Romance
292
Fifteen Minutes at Night
304
Night
316
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About the author (2016)

Jacques Roubaud is one of France's most important contemporary writers. He has published poetry, criticism, drama, and fiction, including the novels in his Hortense series and the several autobiographical volumes continuing the "The Great Fire of London" project, including "The Loop" and "Mathematics: A Novel." A prominent member of the Oulipo, he taught mathematics for many years at the Universit? Paris X Nanterre. He is also a prolific translator from English, having produced French versions of such classics as Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" and Edward Gorey's "The Utter Zoo."

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