Over at The Complete Review, Michael Orthofer has favorably reviewed "Mathematics," the third installment of Jacques Roubaud's great chronicle that began with "The Great Fire of London" and continued with "The Loop." To his credit, Orthofer is astute enough to recognize the book as something other than a novel. He writes that "Mathematics" is "presented decidedly (or at least parenthetically, in the US edition) as: 'a novel', yet the first-person narrative is clearly autobiographical: it seems very much like a memoir of Roubaud's time at university, and then his military service. While creatively presented, there is little that is obviously fictional about it." In other words, it is a chronicle. Odd how many reviewers continue to do without a term (or without coining an alternative) which they so obviously need, choosing each time to describe the genre instead, usually at some length.
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