My Beautiful Bus - Jacques Jouet

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Résumé :
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, this fictional reconstruction focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants.

Biographie:
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.

At the wheel of his latest book, half-hidden by the driver, Basile, [Jacques Jouet] continues his quest for meaning through words and sounds . . . Points of departure and arrival are less important here than the journey itself, which invokes Perrault, Pascal, and the Abbe Prevost as the miles roll past. A defense of movement, be it physical or imagined, that fabulous movement which gave birth to the book. --Jessica Nelson