Hortense in Exile

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.