Jacques Roubaud

The loop

Ian Monk

The third “branch” of Jacques Roubaud's epic, Proustian Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is also an excellent entrance into the series. Adopting math as a career relatively late in his studies, Roubaud here narrates his difficulties both personal and pedagogical, while also investigating the role of mathematics in his life as a remedy to all the messiness of lived experience. “I sought out arithmetic,” he writes, “to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from 'literature.'” But mathematics also provide a refuge from human fears, and from coping, eventually, with tragedies like the death of his wife Alix. As with the previous volumes of The Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is a riveting and humorous anecdotal memoir as well as a fiendishly digressive fiction about the functions of memory and the written word.

(a Novel)

Mathematics

First paperback edition, 1992; second printing [revised], 2006. Original French publication, 1989.

A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations

The Great Fire of London

Hortense in Exile

Il rapimento di Ortensia

Some Thing Black

Alix Cléo Roubaud

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud's wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud--poet, novelist, mathematician--composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind's failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ("I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell"). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ("But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly"). While acknowledging "death calls for a poetry of meditation," Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection--the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in--becomes a "memory infinitely torturous." And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ("These memories are the darkest of all"), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ("I did not save you from that difficult night"). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death's harsh presence ("This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death") and in its acceptance of the mind's limitations ("I do not understand"). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud's wife in 1980 entitled "If Some Thing Black."

Georges Perec

Pierre Lusson

" Par un matin d'août, d'une exquise suavité, dans le jardin fleuri du Moulin d'Andé, en Normandie, les honorables Honinbo Pé-ré-shu et Meijin Ru-bo, assistés de Judan Ru-zo, s'adonnent à leur méditation favorite. Elle consiste à poser alternativement des pions noirs et blancs sur un damier carré et quadrillé : 19 lignes de côté, 361 intersections. Jeu ponctué d'étranges exclamations japonaises : Atari, Ko, Shimari ! Deux adversaires face à face, une partie de deux heures, une victoire aux points : le go fait son entrée en France. Par la grande porte : celle de la littérature, Pé-ré-shu, c'est le romancier Georges Perec, auteur des Choses et de La Disparition. Celle des mathématiques : Ru-bo n'est que l'équivalence nippone du mathématicien-poète Jacques Roubaud, talentueux auteur des sonnets d'Epsilon. Ru-zo : Pierre Lusson, maître assistant à la faculté des Sciences de Paris. Tous les trois viennent de concocter un Petit traité invitant à la découverte de l'art subtil du go, paru aux éditions Christian Bourgois. " A.B. L'Express, 1969

Petit traité invitant à la découverte de l'art subtil du go

[ Ainsi ce jour-là, jour de pluie, en ce trajet-là, je reste ferme, point fixe autour duquel circule la foule qui vaque. Et voilà que je vois, avec surprise, voleter un insecte ; un insecte, ça volète, il hésite, virevolte, va par-ci, va par-là, reva par-ci, reva par-là, puis tout à coup se décide, vient droit sur moi et se pose sur mon épaule (gauche) (je m'interroge du coin de 1'œi1 du souvenir et c'est bien l'épaule gauche). J'ai le temps de reconnaître une coccinelle. Elle est noire avec des pois rouges. Pas le moindre doute, a ladybird, une coccinelle. J'essaye de bouger le moins possible, de rester bien droit, fier de la confiance qu'entre tous les voyageurs elle a choisi d'accorder, sans le moindre chauvinisme, à un " gaijin ". Mais je suis inquiet, très inquiet pour elle : d'où vient-elle ? Qu'est-ce qui l'égare en ces lieux souterrains sinon stygieux ?]

Tokyo infra-ordinaire

Cent Cinquante Poèmes, 1991-1998

La Forme D'une Ville Change Plus Vite, Hélas, Que Le Coeur Des Humains

OULIPO.

Georges Perec publie en 1979 Le Voyage d’hiver, devenu depuis le livre le plus bref de "La Librairie du XXIe siècle". Il y raconte la découverte, par un jeune professeur de lettres, d’un fascinant volume, intitulé précisément Le Voyage d’hiver, qui modifie du tout au tout le regard que l’on peut porter sur les poètes français de la fin du XIXe siècle : ceux-ci apparaissent tous comme tributaires de l’oeuvre d’un auteur aussi génial que méconnu, Hugo Vernier. En 1992, Jacques Roubaud éprouva le besoin d’apporter quelques compléments au récit perecquien. Il fut bientôt suivi en cela par Hervé Le Tellier, puis, au fil des années, par un nombre croissant d’Oulipiens, chacun s’employant à tirer l’histoire d’Hugo Vernier dans une direction inattendue. S'est ainsi constitué, autour du Voyage d’hiver de Perec, un "roman collectif" d’un genre tout à fait nouveau. Les suites au Voyage d'hiver ont été écrites par Michèle Audin, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Bens, Paul Braffort, François Caradec, Frédéric Forte, Paul Fournel, Michelle Grangaud, Jacques Jouet, Étienne Lécroart, Daniel Levin Becker, Harry Mathews, Ian Monk, Hervé Le Tellier, Jacques Roubaud.

Le voyage d'hiver & ses suites

Time is running out for the Inspector, however, as the murderer puts into action his plot to kidnap our heroine Hortense, a 22-year-old philosophy student whose buttocks are so beautiful their description has been banned from the printed page."--BOOK JACKET.

Hortense is Abducted

La Bella Hortensia

Margarida Barahona

O rapto de Hortense

O exílio de Hortense

Teresa Meneses

A bela Hortense

The geometry of life in prose and poetry by a French mathematician. In The End of Clouds, he writes: "Solitude suited them. Not that they were faltering, but there are different ways of sliding across the sky. I would never have thought that such soft, cottony concentration could be reconciled with such an exigent geometry. But how, without any support, consent to dissolution?" By the author of Some Thing Black.

The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis

The second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed "Hortense" series opens with a murder of a dog at the Church of Sainte-Gudule. Chief Inspector Blognard and his sidekick Arapède are on the scene, as is our narrator, Jacques Roubaud. While they track down the Poldevian criminal, teenage girls argue the relative merits of the boy bands Dew-Pon, Dew-Val, and Landau Valley, Père Sinouls tries to program a computer to take his place at the organ so that he can continue to practice Beeranalysis, and the clientele of the Gudule Bar debate the reality of Infinity. Time is running out for the Inspector, however, as the murderer puts into action his plot to kidnap our heroine Hortense, a 22-year-old philosophy student whose buttocks are so beautiful their description has been banned from the printed page.

Offrir, au commencement de l'an 2000, la lecture d'un livre dont le titre contient un mot, poésie, qui sert aujourd'hui à désigner bien des choses - le roman, la chanson, le Plan, les couchers de soleil, etc. sauf ce dont il est question dans ces pages, pourra surprendre. C'est ainsi. Jacques Roubaud. Poésie : constitue la quatrième " branche " de l'œuvre autobiographique de Jacques Roubaud inaugurée en 1989 par " Le Grand Incendie de Londres ". Deux autres volumes ont été publiés depuis : " La Boucle " (1993) et " Mathématique : " (1997).

récit

Poésie

Written in the years following the sudden death of Roubaud's wife, Some Thing Black is a profound and moving transcription of loss, mourning, grief, and the attempts to face honestly and live with the consequences of death, the ever-present "not-there-ness" of the person who was/is loved.

Jacques Roubaud

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