Hortense in Exile

by Jacques Roubaud

Book Overview

Set to marry Gormanskoi, the Premier Prince Presumptive, our beautiful heroine Hortense has been exiled to Queneau stown, where she finds herself in a real-life production of Hamlet or is it Hatmel, the original Poldevian tale scandalously plagiarized by that Englishman William Shahkayspear? Something is definitely amiss in the Poldevian Principalities, and if her loyal friends can t rescue her or foil the plagiarized plots of her evil twin, she may...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564780015
• ISBN13: 9781564780010
• Release Date: July 1992
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Funny and Brainy

Roubaud is one of the few "Postmodernist" writers I can deeply enjoy. One reads the Americans in the canon -- T.C. Boyle, Pynchon, Delillo, et al. -- with a sort of obligatory admiration. The typical work is cleverly plotted, verbally proficient, and suitably "critical" of modern life -- but who cares?Roubaud employs the now standard tricks of the postmodernist: breaking the wall between reader and author, twitting convention, playing with our understandings of culture and media -- and he does so with a wink. This book is hilarious. One senses that his stripping away of all the pretenses of fiction leaves only the author, and that he's charming.