{"id":269686,"date":"2009-03-26T13:44:23","date_gmt":"2009-03-26T13:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/03\/26\/jeremy-davies-on-roubauds-the-loop\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:12","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:12","slug":"jeremy-davies-on-roubauds-the-loop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/03\/26\/jeremy-davies-on-roubauds-the-loop\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Davies on Roubaud's The Loop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the always interesting Front Table,<\/a> editor Jeremy Davies has a nice piece about the forthcoming release of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop<\/em>,<\/a> (click to pre-order from Seminary Co-op) the second “branch” in his “Great Fire of London cycle.”<\/p>\n

\n

At some point I\u2019d become aware that The Great Fire of London<\/em> is, in fact, the title given to a cycle of interrelated books, not simply to a single novel\u2014as Proust\u2019s is called \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>, or Powell\u2019s is A Dance to the Music of Time<\/em>, or Dorothy Richardson\u2019s is Pilgrimage.<\/em> The book published as The Great Fire of London is a single volume in this series, and in context is more accurately called by its proper name, \u201cDestruction.\u201d The Loop<\/em>, which comes out this April in its first English translation, is \u201cbranch two\u201d of Great Fire. Where \u201cDestruction\u201d is Roubaud seeking to force an ordering system over his despair as a conscious alternative to putting an end to his life, in the wake of his wife Alix\u2019s death from illness and a brother\u2019s suicide, The Loop<\/em> is very much about memory itself, its cyclical nature, its untrustworthiness. For all its concern with darkness, it\u2019s a sunnier branch than \u201cDestruction\u201d\u2014spring has arrived!\u2014since it doesn\u2019t take up the same binary as the earlier book (that is, writing or death).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Still, the golden childhood days that Roubaud describes in The Loop were lived out during the German Occupation, with one parent and one grandparent actively participating in the French Resistance\u2014so the basic tenuousness of life, the fragility of happiness, is never far from our narrator\u2019s mind. What is it, then, about these books\u2014haunted by death, failure, loss, recursion\u2014that so appeals to me?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Firstly, they are funny, charming\u2014effortless and overwhelming all at once. They are not quite novels, not quite memoirs (more precisely, to use Roubaud\u2019s own formulation, they are \u201cnot-not\u201d novels . . . that is, they are whatever strange animal we\u2019re left with after a double negative [because, using the logic of the books, a double negation doesn\u2019t necessarily give you the same positive you left behind after adding that initial \u201cnot\u201d . . .]). Roubaud is, I think, \u201cour\u201d Proust\u2014though their projects are very different\u2014in that they both employ the form of the novel (explicitly in Proust\u2019s case, circumspectly in Roubaud\u2019s) to examine their memories, and draw conclusions about human life and memory in general.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Roubaud’s going to be in New York next week to participate in Oulipo in New York,<\/a> a series of events highlighting the work of several Oulipo writers, including Ian Monk and Marcel Benabou.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the always interesting Front Table, editor Jeremy Davies has a nice piece about the forthcoming release of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, (click to pre-order from Seminary Co-op) the second “branch” in his “Great Fire of London cycle.” At some point I\u2019d become aware that The Great Fire of London is, in fact, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,21546,21526,21516,21506,21556,21536],"class_list":["post-269686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-great-fire-of-london","tag-jacques-roubaud","tag-jeremy-davies","tag-oulipo","tag-oulipo-in-new-york","tag-the-loop"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353666,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269686\/revisions\/353666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}