Great Fire of London     by Jacques Roubaud, Translated by Dominic DiBernardi Original title: Grand incendie de Londres Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: July 1, 1992 Format: Paperback, 330 pages ISBN: 0916583899 List Price: $12.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: July 1, 1991 Format: Cloth, 330 pages ISBN: 0916583767 List Price: $21.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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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 grea t 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 br i ng 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 tradit i on 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 th at 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 t ext 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"). It is destined to take its place as one of the key enterprises of the last half century.

"How can any description do justice to this astonishing work? It is literally incomp arable: I can think of no other book that suggests its scope, its methods, its effect. Analogies may perhaps be looked for in the other arts—the Sagrada Familia of Gaudi (had he brought it to completion), certain vast compositions of Messiaen. . . . But (their complicity and originality aside) even these examples do a disservice to The Great Fire of London , which is free of any taint of mysticism and metaphysics. It is a supremely human work, born of the spirited integrity of a rare mind out of the multiform experiences of a body capable of intense torment and delight.

"It begins in the darkness of almost unbearable deprivation, and if it emerges from that darkness, it does not lead us towards any soothing outcome. Its only consolation—an immense one for the reader—is to allow us to accompany the author on an extraordinary quest of creation, one that he half knows is doomed but that he nevertheless pursues with ruthless, witty determination. The quest proceeds nowhere except to the existence of this very book. The quest becomes a questioning. And because as we read we become part of that questioning, we eventually learn to play in a world rife with mystery and kitchen implements, with mathematics and childhood memories, with all the bewildering parapherna lia of concept, passion, sensation, and practicality that makes this work as fascinating as life itself."—Harry Mathews

"Every once in a while we are greeted by a book defying all norms, the result of some gigantic or original project that, to be apprecia ted, requires ridding ourselves of our usual reading habits and consenting to follow, at least at the start, an intellectually demanding procedure that afterwards can reveal itself to be the source of profound joys within a playful universe. This book by Jacques Roubaud is one of these peaks."—Le Soir de Bruxelles

"[Roubaud has] finally produced the 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."—Gabriel Josipovici, The Independent (London)

"Roubaud's book is remarkable. . . . The Great Fire of London is an entirely sympathetic book to read, but in its careful organization it is also a heartening one, as showing the power of artifice to manage even the keenest of distress."—John Sturrock, Times Literary Supplement

"There's something for every taste: scholarly reflections, at once sober and amusing, on butter croissants, typewriters, versification in the Spanish Mid dle Ages, the making of azarole jelly (that recalls quite closely the art of writing); plus autobiographical fragments. Chapter 6, on London, is as moving as it is magnificent. This is a fascinating book that defies classification."— L'Humanite

"One of the most strange and intelligently constructed books published in a long while."—Le Monde

"Roubaud is a writer of simmering passions, of secret pleasures. . . . Oulipian, he practices the playful skills passed on by his teacher, Raymond Queneau, toying wit h rules and constraints. In his text a space opens out for the reader, who must weave his own book from the threads offered by the writer, search for the figure in the carpet."—L'Hebdo

"In The Great Fire of London Jacques Roubaud has written a great, fea rsome book; fearsome because it tells of the destruction of the project which gave the author a new lease on life. This is not the bitter, despairing gesture of a writer burning his manuscripts, but an exemplary separation: the author painstakingly descri bes his goals and his self-imposed and self-invented literary constraints. Clarifying his project, Jacques Roubaud explains what is at stake in his writing: the exploration of the potentials of human language. The Great Fire of London is a book to read and reread. . . . At the end of the journey we, like the author, are no longer the same."—Revolution

"Everything in this book expresses the emotion of looking and writing."—La Croix l'Evenement

"There is a mouth-watering description of the ideal croissant; a winsome self-portrait of the artist as an inveterate walker, swimmer, counter and reader; a paean to English women novelists; an evocation of London as a world of libraries and bookstores; bits of unexpected wisdom . . . interesting information about m edieval poetry; and a heart-breaking evocation of the deepest sorrow, made all the more powerful because Roubaud refuses to speak directly of Alix's death."—Washington Post Book World

"Roubaud is a humorous and sometimes earthy writer whose work can be enj oyed by a wide variety of readers. . . . Employing free association, he gives us not only observations about literature, but much autobiographical material, some of which is erotic. . . . Roubaud writes lucidly and often entertainingly about whatever inte rests him, and the thoroughness of his scholarship is evident. Students of avant-garde prose will find The Great Fire fascinating, but those who don't care about schools of writing and just want to enjoy heartfelt, intelligent literature leavened with humor will be pleased with it as well. Dominic Di Bernardi does a fine job of translating and also contributes a very informative afterword."—San Diego Tribune

"Engaging, challenging, and a pleasure to read. . . . [T]he translation is very fine, and the Dalkey Archive is to be commended once again for its important cultural work."—American Book Review