My Beautiful Bus
2003
First Published
3.34
Average Rating
130
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
3.34
Number of Ratings
32
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
38%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
3%
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Author
Jacques Jouet
Author · 5 books
Jacques Jouet is a French writer and has been a participating member of the Oulipo literary project since 1983. He is a poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and plasticine artist specializing in collages. As a member of l'Oulipo, Jouet became its focus in June 2009 when he began publicly writing a serialized novel in five days. He first became involved with Oulipo in 1978, stemming from a writing course directed by Paul Fournel, Georges Perec, and Jacques Roubaud. His serial The Republic of Mek Ouyes was broadcasted simultaneously on radio and on the web, through the site of his publisher, P.O.L. Jouet wrote Poèmes de métro while riding the underground trains of the Paris Métro.
