The Princess Hoppy or the tale of labrador

Fülszöveg

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful new 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,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful new 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.
Jacques Roubaud, born in 1932, has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre since 1970 and is one of the most accomplished members of Oulipo, the workshop for experimental literature founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. He is president of l'Association Georges Perec. He has published in all genres: prose, theater, and poetry. He has also translated Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark and contemporary American poetry into French. Roubaud is best known in this country as the author of the delightful Hortense novels: Our Beautiful Heroine (Overlook, 1987), Hortense Is Abducted (Dalkey Archive, 1989), and Hortense in Exile (Dalkey Archive, 1992).
Bernard Hopffner, born in 1946, has lived in England, Germany, the Canary Islands, and since 1979, in Lyon, France. Co-founder of the Anglo-French literary magazine La Main de Singe, he has translated works by Edmund White, Coleman Dowell, Joseph McElroy, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Guy Davenport, among many others. Vissza