Place Names - Softcover

Ricardou, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564784789 ISBN 13: 9781564784780

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007

Synopsis

Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else's? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it? Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he's widely seen as a difficult writer, or worse yet, as an intensely serious one. However, he easily sheds this weighty reputation in his hilariously playful new novel about the notoriously complex world of literary theory. Supplying his readers with everything they need to know to navigate this world, Ricardou uses his own irreverent interpretation of deconstructive theory to ask questions about language and history, theory and life, and all the intriguing connections between them.

About this title

About the Author

Jordan Stump is the noted translator of several modern French novelists, including novel prize winner Claude Simon, for whom his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes won the French American Foundation s Translation Prize.

Reviews

A little bit Borges and a little bit Calvino, French postmodernist Ricardou's newly translated 1969 novel proves a circuitous trek through a fictive landscape of eight metaphorically named places. Bannière, Beaufort, Belarbre, Belcroix, Cendrier, Chaumont, Hautbois and Monteaux—each gets its own chapter, and each serves as a source from which language springs, along with the whimsically opaque plot. In the medieval village of Bannière stands the 19th-century museum house of the late fictional artist Albert Crucis (simply the genitive of the Latin crux, 'cross' ), where a young traveler, whose name is not revealed until midbook, begins his visit to the area. He will run into an antiquarian dealer named Epsilon (l'espion, the spy) and an elusive woman in a red dress, named Atta, who shares his passion for recondite research into the work of Crucis. The two travelers dig for clues in the artist's allegorical paintings, which depict the eight places in question. Ricardou is a practitioner of the nouveau roman, and his experimental work frees the narrative from conventional rules and plunges it, delightfully, into quandary, contradiction and travel-literature parody. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564784789
• ISBN 13: 9781564784780
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126