The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations

Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991. First American edition. 330pp; 8vo; maroon cloth boards; gilt spine titles; dust jacket. Dense but quite lightly colored foxing to textblock edges and endpapers; a few spots of soiling to front board. Very good in a very good (+) jacket, unclipped, with mild foxing to interior.

A postmodern novel by the French mathematician, poet, and Oulipo member, in which a writer, Roubaud, struggling in the wake of his wife's death, fails to write a novel, The Great Fire of London, and instead writes this, a novel/not-novel of digressions and asides, an oblique processing of grief and an extended meditation on the act of literary creation. Translated with an afterword by Dominic Di Bernardi.