Title | : | Hortense Is Abducted (Hortense, #2) |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 1564782565 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9781564782564 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 229 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 1987 |
-- 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).
Hortense Is Abducted (Hortense, #2) Reviews
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The beginning is strictly Gothic – the way all the scary pulp fiction should really begin…
Not a soul, not a cat. Not the soul of a cat, consequently. The sounds of the city arrived only faintly, as if from far away, as if come from another world: the world of anguish, of the ephemeral, of illusion; the world that is barbarous, carnivorous, villainous; the world of fevers, beavers, bacterium; of biles, of woes, of crimes; the world of dementia, of embolism, of entropy; of lucre, of licentiousness, of smoke; of lycanthropy, of pyromania, of syzygy; and reciprocally… you know, the world.
Hortense Is Abducted is an absurdist mystery – the absurdist crimes are being investigated using absurdist methods…
Hortense Is Abducted is a postmodernistic detective story – the postmodern author talks to a hypothetical reader discussing the ways to write mysteries and deriding pulp fiction clichés… And, along with the valiant and sapient puss, wearing no boots though, he takes an active part in the plot and action.
And every absurdist crime must have its absurdist motives… And at last, in the end we learn the incredible truth. -
"A vida continua. O Sol põe-se levanta-se põe-se levanta-se põe-se levanta-se põe-se levanta-se põe-se levanta-se. Está um lindo dia."
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Highly informed and stylized, Hortense Is Abducted is a madcap dissection of the detective genre featuring characters Roubaud developed in an earlier novel Our Beautiful Heroine, one which I haven't read. This is all out Oulipo, games and maths subvert the story and any sources of sentiment. The crime is solved via math, based on the sequence of characters appearing in the text. There are nods and plaudits all around. I did appreciate the effort, the scintillating architecture even if the sighs eventually defeated the laughter.
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From
Jacques the Fatalist to Jacques Roubaud: OuLiPo’s lesser-known practitioner and most famous surviving member, excluding Harry Mathews, who isn’t really French anyway. For some reason, Dalkey Archive have only released two volumes in the Hortense trilogy—the first,
Our Beautiful Heroine, has been translated by Overlook Press, but is due a reprint—but grumbles aside, there’s much ludic OuLiPo larks in this farcical detective spoof. A brief scan of this book’s blurb sums up the anarchic and delicious imagination of this professor, scholar, wit and all-around genius. Daft, ingenious, hilarious postmodern fun for the high-brow reader too proud to read Sedaris. -
070219: play with plot...
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One of my favorite first sentences ever.
Much to enjoy, much to think about; the problem for me was that there is much to think about again, and again...and again... I have never seen the "meta" laid on so thickly and persistently. So much about the author not being in control of his text, about the characters bearing independent existences, etc. It felt like Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions, but with the metaliterary cross-penetration of author's reality and fictional diegesis fetishized. And I didn't feel like it was an absurdist fetishization, one that might even be parodic of texts that smugly play with narratological "meta"ness--though maybe that was the intent. It certainly didn't feel that way though.
Some of the anthropomorphism is charming, though the personalities of cats don't get much more nuance than what you'd typically find in the collected internet memes on them as languid, spoiled, self-indulgent creatures.
The use of the map, the fabrication of countries, the absurdist parody of detective genre conventions--enjoyable and thought-provoking.
The source of my dulled enthusiasm could be that I love Roubaud's poetry, and am a huge fan of the quadrilingual "Renga" he did with Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, and Eduardo Sanguinetti--add to that my infatuation with the first sentence, and this generally left me expecting something more subtle and twistedly wry.
I will still cherish and quote that first sentence though... -
I fell in love with Jacques Roubaud in about 5 minutes.