Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Princess Hoppy, Or, the Tale of Labrador: Or, the Tale of Labrador

Princess Hoppy, Or, the Tale of Labrador: Or, the Tale of Labrador

Hoepffner, Bernard
Roubaud, Jacques

Paperback

General Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1564780325
ISBN13: 9781564780324
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: Sep 1 1993
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.43 Width: 5.53 Depth: 8.44
Language: English
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.

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