a story with interpolations & bifurcations 
 
Jacques Roubaud. Translated with an Afterword by Dominic Di Bernardi. 
 
Dalkey Archive: 1989. First American edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Small stain on the top edge of the text block. Trace stains on the fore edge. 330 pages. Near fine. Scarce. 
 
An epic of French postmodernism about grief and text, springing from the ancient tradition of the troubadours while adhering to an intricate formal structure. Mourning the deaf of his young wife Alix, unable to write his novel The Great Fire of London, Roubaud the character/author interlaces two sets of digressions (interpolations & bifurcations) leading the reader out of the story the writer has failed to create and into obsessive interpretation. There's no success like failure ... 
 
"The paths of poetry and mathematics converged. Their intrinsic, conflicting oneness (in and for the Project, I mean; here I'm not producing the least hint of a thesis on the essence and relationship of these two forms) became a unified couple, the double of two maxims:
 
     (M) Poetry is the memory of language
      (R) Mathematics in the rhythm of the world."