Princess Hoppy     by Jacques Roubaud, Translated by Bernard Hoepffner Original title: La Princesse Hoppy Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: September 1, 1993 Format: Paperback, 133 pages ISBN: 1564780325 List Price: $9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful 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 rea der 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 a nd 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 lang u ages (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 at tention—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.

"Exhilarating. . . . [T]he chief pleasures of this bo ok are its narrative inventiveness and vigorously related amusing parodies, excellently translated by Bernard Hoepffner. Mr. Roubaud is a vivid and charming writer who seems to smile as he makes esthetic and philosophical points about the autonomy of fict ion and the illusory nature of destiny. He is, moreover, highly proficient at various forms of humor, from the silly to the sophisticated. When he does satirize the vanities of society, his touch is light and never mean-spirited. . . . [ The Princess Hoppy is] a delightfully eccentric book, [where] Mr. Roubaud combines a nimble intellect with an endearingly buoyant spirit."—New York Times Book Review

"[A] zany jeu d'esprit."—Washington Post Book World

"Delightful and full of fun."—Cleveland Plain Dealer

"One of the strangest books that I have ever had the pleasure of reading completely and finding that I had not quite fully understood just what it is I was reading is Jacques Roubaud's The Princess Hoppy . . . . Roubaud takes advantage of language . . . expectations of heroic fairy tales, and postmodern perspective to create a story rife with intrigue, suspense, and mathematical puzzles. The Princess Hoppy is an irreverent trip throughout collective consciousness, with elements familiar to everyone, but with a bizarre twist, making us realize just how it is we go about reading stories. I have found the story to be educational . . . and simultaneously fabulously entertaining. This is one book that will be read many times and recommended as a positive and fun read. I have never before read anything that had an appendix containing questions for the reader and two indexes. I still can't answer them all, and I can't read Grasshopper either, but I'm glad it's in there. Check it out, it is inconceivably cool!"— Texture