The Princess Hoppy or the Tale of the Labrador

by Jacques Roubaud

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? the tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara to name only a few. (Even the Sun has a speaking role.) There are dramatic abductions, daring rescues, passages in hitherto untranscribed languages (Dog, Grasshopper, Duck), tales of unrequited love, allegorical interludes, poems, a playlet, and much more. (But no suspenders, the author promises.) Finally, there are 79 questions for readers of the novel, to see how closely they've been paying attention—for ultimately The Princess Hoppy is a giddy inquiry into how we read literary works. It is both an old-fashioned tale and an ultramodern hypertext, the oldest and the latest thing in fiction.

"Exhilarating. . . . [T]he chief pleasures of this book are its narrative inventiveness and vigorously related amusing parodies, excellently translated by Bernard Hoepffner. Mr. Roubaud is a vivid and charming writer who seems to smile as he makes esthetic and philosophical points about the autonomy of fiction and the illusory nature of destiny. He is, moreover, highly proficient at various forms of humor, from the silly to the sophisticated. When he does satirize the vanities of society, his touch is light and never meanspirited." (New York Times Book Review 9-26-93)

"A zany jeu d'esprit." (Washington Post Book World 12-19-93)

"Delightful and full of fun." (Cleveland Plain Dealer 12-12-93)

"One of the strangest books that I have ever had the pleasure of reading completely and finding that I had not quite fully understood just what it is I was reading is Jacques Roubaud's The Princess Hoppy. . . . Roubaud takes advantage of language, . . . expectations of heroic fairy tales, and postmodern perspective to create a story rife with intrigue, suspense, and mathematical puzzles. The Princess Hoppy is an irreverent trip through out collective consciousness, with elements familiar to everyone, but with a bizarre twist, making us realize just how it is we go about reading stories. I have found the story to be educational . . . and simultaneously fabulously entertaining. This is one book that will be read many times and recommended as a positive and fun read." (Texture #6)

Genres: French Literature

132 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Jacques Roubaud was a French poet, writer and mathematician.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

For such a gifted mathematician, linguist, historian and poet, Jacques Roubaud is a wee daftie. This novel delights in wordplay, maths problems, storytelling tropes, subverting the reader-writer relationship with callisthenic nonsense prose whose games and riddles are either deeply imbedded, or one great confidence trick. Mr Roubaud is an accomplished prose-poet and Oulipo legend whose Hortense novels might pigeonhole him as a postmodern prankster. But his genius runs deeper. See, for instance, his latest book on Mathematics.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mysteries!! What goes on in the world? What goes on in a book? What should go on in a book, anyway? At first I was flummoxed, frustrated & frazzled by this one. An exercise in "playful" postmodernism at its worst, I felt, all "experimental," that dreaded phrase that too often becomes an excuse for "this doesn't have to make any sense!!" Using the simple trappings of the fairy tale genre, Roubaud introduces a number of characters, both human & animal, sets various scenes, establishes patterns - with mock mathematical precision - & proceeds to...well, I'm not sure exactly what. There are stories within stories that never resolve, & anything recognizable & dependable is liable to change at any moment. It's enough to drive you batty. Why go thru with it at all? Then, a revelation. By the ending, my sensibilities & expectations became so completely fried that I just embraced the chaos & went with the flow as it were, which just got exponentially wackier, climaxing in a hilarious series of review questions that are as pointless as they are ridiculous ("Justify the choice of bone varieties hidden by the dog."), & unbelievably had me going back to the beginning to start all over again with my fresh attitude & outlook. The whole thing is book-ended by a pronouncement from the tale (tail?) itself that may contain the entire secret of everything, stripping away all the silliness to arrive at a surprise declaration of profound love. Or not!