My Beautiful Bus
Mar 2013 · Deep Vellum Publishing
Ebook
112
Pages
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About this ebook
Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. With detours through everything from Puss in Boots to Pascal's maxims, we are introduced to each eccentric passenger as they climb aboard (one, for example, claims to have a corpse in his luggage), every character bringing us one step further into Jouet's imaginative universe: their conversations, preoccupations, reactions, and possibilities taking their places as elements of a fiction in the narrator's mind. In the final pages it becomes clear that the book itself is a sort of bus, boarded impulsively and with no fixed destination in mind, and that it has carried its readers to places they could not have imagined.
About the author
Jacques Jouet was elected to the Oulipo in 1983. He is the author of more than sixty texts in a variety of genres—novels, poetry, plays, literary criticism, and short fiction—including the novels Mountain R (part of his La Re?publique roman cycle), Savage, and Upstaged, all published by Dalkey Archive.
Eric Lamb is a literary translator from French. The first installment of his translation of Pierre Grimbert’s fantasy series, The Secret of Ji, will appear in the autumn of 2012.
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