'The Great Fire of London: A story with interpolations and bifurcations' by Jacques Roubaud

In failing to write a novel entitled The Great Fire of London, Roubaud has instead written a fascinating, frustrating, mathematically careful account of that failure, and of the porosity of the conceptual barriers between circumstance, experience and intention. As he writes, and by writing (and by writing about the act of writing), Roubaud attempts to come to terms with the death of his wife: his rigorous and highly complex literary project, with its arbitrary rules, its avoidances and confrontations, its extremities of scale and focus, its halls of mirrors reflecting other mirrors in which other mirrors are reflected, its endless digressions and insertions, shows a mind unbalanced and refashioned by love and grief. Roubaud is a member of OULIPO (a group of writers who seek to realise new potential in literature by the application of constraints.
Some of Roubaud's mathematical poetry.
The OULPIO site (in French).
A few OULIPO writing exercises. 

(April 2014)