----
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Raymond Queneau was born in Le Havre in 1903 and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, his intentionality.
----Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.
----Queneau became a well-known name in France after the huge success of his novel Zazie dans le métro (1959), in which he tells the adventures of a 12-year-old girl from the country who comes to Paris for the first time. Zazie was filmed by Louis Malle the following year, when the French nouvelle vague was sweeping across the international movie scene, and the success of both the book and the film propped Queneau to a sort of celebrity -- a fame seldom experienced by writers sharing his level of erudition and complexity.
----Queneau joined in 1950 the Collège of Pataphysique, the group of intellectuals and writers whose zany, tongue-in-cheek manner brought a sort of Brothers-Marxist approach to French philosophy. Pataphysics was created by poet and playwright Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), and is defined as the science of imaginary solutions, or the science which investigates not the laws of Nature, but the exceptions to those laws.
----In 1960 Queneau founded, together with François Le Lionnais, the "Oulipo" (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). This is a group of writers who include Georges Perec, Harry Matthews, Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Jacques Bens and others. The Oulipo projects were to a great extent a result of Queneau's love for mathematics, a love that he expressed in a series of essays and papers on number theory, set theory and combinatory analysis. He was made a member of the Goncourt Academy in 1951, and died in 1976. -- Braulio Tavares, Scriptorium
![]()
Official Website (French)
Interview
Official Oulipo (French)
Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. As a haiku, a telegram, an official letter, a blurb for a novel, a word game, and an ode. As apostrophe, onomatopoeia, and parechesis. It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically. It's even told as interjections: "Psst! h'm! ah! oh! hem! ah! ha! . . ." In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus, witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St.-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat.
There's nothing especially avant-garde about Queneau's Exercises in Style. Such playful rhetorical exercises, called copia, were popular in the schoolrooms of Shakespeare's day. A favorite textbook of that time, De Copia by Erasmus, illustrated the exercise with more than 150 variations on the simple sentence (in Latin), "Your letter pleased me greatly."
Queneau said he wanted to do for literature what Bach did for music in the Art of fugue. He also wanted to simultaneously clean up the French language, remove its archaic, stuffy conventions, while affirming its elasticity, its variety, its refusal to be contained in anything so deadening as an 'official' language. It is a little known fact that Exercises is a detective story, with the solution fittingly revealed in the 99th chapter.
Buy it
Read these excerpts:
NOTATION:
In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone's been having a tug‑of‑war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.
Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He's with a friend who's saying: "You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat." He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.
THE SUBJECTIVE SIDE:
I was not displeased with my attire this day. I was in augurating a new, rather sprightly hat, and an overcoat of which I thought most highly. Met X in front of the gare St.‑Lazare who tried to spoil my pleasure by trying to prove that this over coat is cut too low at the lapels and that I ought to have an extra button on it. At least he didn't dare attack my headgear.
A bit earlier I had roundly told off a vulgar type who was purposely ill‑treating me every time anyone went by getting off or on. This happened in one of those unspeakably foul omnibi which fill up with hoi polloi precisely at those times when I have to consent to use them.
ANOTHER SUBJECTIVITY:
Next to me on the bus platform today there was one of those half‑baked young fellows, you don't find so many of them these days, thank God, otherwise I should end up by killing one. This particular one, a brat of something like 26 or 30, irritated me particularly not so much because of his great long featherless turkey's neck as because of the nature of the ribbon round his hat, a ribbon which wasn't much more than a sort of maroon‑colored string. Dirty beast! He absolutely disgusted me! As there were a lot of people in our bus at that hour I took advantage of all the pushing and shoving there is every time anyone gets on or off to dig him in the ribs with my elbow. In the end he took to his heels, the milksop, before I could make up my mind to tread on his dogs to teach him a lesson. I could also have told him, just to annoy him, that he needed another button on his overcoat which was cut too low at the lapels.
PAST:
I got into the Porte Champerret bus. There were a lot of people in it, young, old, women, soldiers. I paid for my ticket and then looked around me. It wasn't very interesting. But finally I noticed a young man whose neck I thought was too long. I examined his hat and I observed that instead of a ribbon it had a plaited cord. Every time another passenger got on there was a lot of pushing and shoving. I didn't say anything, but all the same the young man with the long neck started to quarrel with his neighbor. I didn't hear what he said, but they gave each other some dirty looks. Then the young man with the long neck went and sat down in a hurry.
Coming back from the Porte Champerret I passed in front of the gare Saint‑Lazarre. I saw my young man having a discussion with a pal. The pal indicated a button just above the lapels of the young man's overcoat. Then the bus took me off and I didn't see them any more. I had a seat and I wasn't thinking about anything.
PRESENT:
At midday the heat coils round the feet of bus passengers. If, placed on a long neck, a stupid head adorned with a grotesque hat should chance to become inflamed, then a quarrel immediately breaks out. Very soon to become dissipated, however, in an atmosphere too heavy to carry ultimate insults very vividly from mouth to ear.
Thus one goes and sits down inside, where it's cool.
Later can be posed, in front of stations with double courtyards, sartorial questions about some button or other which fingers slimy with sweat self‑confidently fiddle with.
REPORTED SPEECH:
Dr. Queneau said that it had happened at midday. Some passengers had got into the bus. They had been squashed tightly together. On his head a young man had been wearing a hat which had been encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. He had had a long neck. He had complained to the man standing next to him about the continual jostling which the latter had been inflic ting on him. As soon as he had noticed a vacant seat, said Dr. Queneau, the young man had rushed off towards it and sat down upon it.
He had seen him later, Dr. Queneau continued, in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He had been wearing an overcoat, and a friend who had happened to be present had made a remark to him to the effect that he ought to put an extra button on the said overcoat.
PASSIVE:
It was midday. The bus was being got into by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman, which hat was encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. A long neck was one of the characteristics of the young gentleman. The man standing next to him was being grumbled at by the latter because of the jostling which was being inflicted on him by him. As soon as a vacant seat was espied by the young gentleman it was made the object of his precipitate movements and it become sat down upon.
The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He was clothed in an overcoat and was having a remark made to him by a friend who happened to be there to the effect that it was necessary to have an extra button put on it.
ANTIPHRASIS:
Midnight. It's raining. The buses go by nearly empty. On the bonnet of an AI near the Bastille, an old man whose head is sunk in his shoulders and who isn't wearing a hat thanks a lady sitting a long way away from him because she is stroking his hands. Then he goes to stand on the knees of a man who is still sitting down.
Two hours earlier, behind the gare de Lyon, this old man was stopping up his ears so as not to hear a tramp who was refusing to say that he should slightly lower the bottom button on his underpants.
ABUSIVE:
After a stinking wait in the vile sun I finally got into a filthy bus where a bunch of bastards were squashed together. The most bastardly of these bastards was a pustulous creature with a ridiculously long windpipe who was sporting a grotesque hat with a cord instead of a ribbon. This pretentious puppy started to create because an old bastard was pounding his plates with senile fury, but soon he climbed down and made off in the direction of an empty seat that was still damp with the sweat of the buttocks of its previous owner.
Two hours later, my unlucky day, I came upon the same bastard holding forth with another bastard in front of that nauseating monument they call the gare Saint‑Lazare. They were yammering about a button. Whether he has his furuncle raised or lowered, I said to myself, he'll still be just as lousy, the dirty bastard.
Raymond Queneau's 'Arithmétique'
Raymond Queneau - Interview
Raymond Queneau à propos de "Zazie dans le métro"
Raymond Queneau - Manuscrit "Zazie dans le métro"
![]()
Oulipo Compendium (excerpts)
Queneau quotes
Queneau's uptopian dream worlds
Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems, published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 100,000,000,000,000 different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day. In 1997, a French court decision outlawed the publication on the Internet of this poem. The court decided that the son of Queneau and the Gallimard editions possessed an exclusive and moral right on this poem, thus outlawing any publication of it on the Internet and possibility for the reader to play Queneau's interactive game of poem construction. However, two online interactive versions do exist.
Stanley Chapman's version
Bevrowe's version
Buy the book
![]()
Saint Glinglin (Dalkey Archive) Queneau has created a world, starting with its banalities: the cliches, the tired small talk, the outdated prejudices, the little points of pride. This world, Home Town, is settled in its ways under perpetually blue skies and under the guidance of Nabonidus, its proud mayor. But the mayor's children, all corrupted by influences from Foreign Town, turn against both their father and the traditional ways. To say any more about the plot is to imply that there really is one. Like all of Queneau's books, this is much about language, both dry experimentation (the entire book is a lipogram--there are no X s) and full of neologisms and quirky style. -- PW
The Blue Flowers (New Directions)The Blue Flowers is the most lovable of all Raymond Queneau's novels. It relates two paralell narratives (or rather - and Queneau is the great mathematical novelist! - base and perpendicular narratives): the historical narrative of the endearingly aggressive Duc d'Auge, nay-sayer to royal authority and public opinion, friend of Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade, and debunker of religion to the extent of daubing on caves in the Perigord region to 'prove' the existence of humanity before Adam; his three daughters, including the defective, bleating Phelise, and their small-minded spouses; his squire Mouscaillot and their talking horses, philosophical Demosthenes and taciturn Stef; and his clerical foils, the abbes Biroton and Riphinte. -- Darragh O'Donoghue
Zazie dans le Metro (Penguin) Raymond Queneau has written a strange but tantalizing little novel about an adolescent named Zazie... she has a New York accent, and the mouth of a Henry Miller. Her misadventures in Paris, prove challenging to those around her,and amusing to the reader. It's a collage of seemimgly misplaced dialogue and eccentric characters, yet is easy to read and laugh with. Zazie is less of a labyrinth and more of a amusement park, a good introduction to this imaginative writer. -- Allen Greenbaum
We Always Treat Women too Well (NYRB)We Always Treat Women Too Well was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara, but this novel by Raymond Queneau is a further manifestation of his sly, provocative, wonderfully wayward genius. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.
The Flight of Icarus (New Directions) Hubert, a writer, has lost the main character to the novel he is, well was, writing. After viciously accusing friends and fellow writers of stealing Icarus, he hires the detective Morcol, "who has appeared in many novels under different names," to find him. Soon we meet Icarus, who is only 15 pages old and on his own in 1890 Paris, and begin to see the formation from what Hubert designed, to a real character through his first experience with absinthe, his girlfriend LN, his love of automobiles and bicycles, and his love of flying machines. -- Jeff O. ----
*
p.s. Hey from Tokyo theoretically where I'm probably less jet-lagged now and have something of an initial grip on this undoubtedly wondrous city. Speaking of wondrous, Raymond Queneau is your topic and entertainment du jour. Nice, right? I hope you're all doing really well.
Raymond Queneau was born in Le Havre in 1903 and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, his intentionality.
----Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.
----Queneau became a well-known name in France after the huge success of his novel Zazie dans le métro (1959), in which he tells the adventures of a 12-year-old girl from the country who comes to Paris for the first time. Zazie was filmed by Louis Malle the following year, when the French nouvelle vague was sweeping across the international movie scene, and the success of both the book and the film propped Queneau to a sort of celebrity -- a fame seldom experienced by writers sharing his level of erudition and complexity.
----Queneau joined in 1950 the Collège of Pataphysique, the group of intellectuals and writers whose zany, tongue-in-cheek manner brought a sort of Brothers-Marxist approach to French philosophy. Pataphysics was created by poet and playwright Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), and is defined as the science of imaginary solutions, or the science which investigates not the laws of Nature, but the exceptions to those laws.
----In 1960 Queneau founded, together with François Le Lionnais, the "Oulipo" (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). This is a group of writers who include Georges Perec, Harry Matthews, Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Jacques Bens and others. The Oulipo projects were to a great extent a result of Queneau's love for mathematics, a love that he expressed in a series of essays and papers on number theory, set theory and combinatory analysis. He was made a member of the Goncourt Academy in 1951, and died in 1976. -- Braulio Tavares, Scriptorium
Official Website (French)Interview
Official Oulipo (French)
Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. As a haiku, a telegram, an official letter, a blurb for a novel, a word game, and an ode. As apostrophe, onomatopoeia, and parechesis. It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically. It's even told as interjections: "Psst! h'm! ah! oh! hem! ah! ha! . . ." In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus, witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St.-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat.
There's nothing especially avant-garde about Queneau's Exercises in Style. Such playful rhetorical exercises, called copia, were popular in the schoolrooms of Shakespeare's day. A favorite textbook of that time, De Copia by Erasmus, illustrated the exercise with more than 150 variations on the simple sentence (in Latin), "Your letter pleased me greatly."
Queneau said he wanted to do for literature what Bach did for music in the Art of fugue. He also wanted to simultaneously clean up the French language, remove its archaic, stuffy conventions, while affirming its elasticity, its variety, its refusal to be contained in anything so deadening as an 'official' language. It is a little known fact that Exercises is a detective story, with the solution fittingly revealed in the 99th chapter.
Buy it
Read these excerpts:
NOTATION:
In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone's been having a tug‑of‑war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.
Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He's with a friend who's saying: "You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat." He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.
THE SUBJECTIVE SIDE:
I was not displeased with my attire this day. I was in augurating a new, rather sprightly hat, and an overcoat of which I thought most highly. Met X in front of the gare St.‑Lazare who tried to spoil my pleasure by trying to prove that this over coat is cut too low at the lapels and that I ought to have an extra button on it. At least he didn't dare attack my headgear.
A bit earlier I had roundly told off a vulgar type who was purposely ill‑treating me every time anyone went by getting off or on. This happened in one of those unspeakably foul omnibi which fill up with hoi polloi precisely at those times when I have to consent to use them.
ANOTHER SUBJECTIVITY:
Next to me on the bus platform today there was one of those half‑baked young fellows, you don't find so many of them these days, thank God, otherwise I should end up by killing one. This particular one, a brat of something like 26 or 30, irritated me particularly not so much because of his great long featherless turkey's neck as because of the nature of the ribbon round his hat, a ribbon which wasn't much more than a sort of maroon‑colored string. Dirty beast! He absolutely disgusted me! As there were a lot of people in our bus at that hour I took advantage of all the pushing and shoving there is every time anyone gets on or off to dig him in the ribs with my elbow. In the end he took to his heels, the milksop, before I could make up my mind to tread on his dogs to teach him a lesson. I could also have told him, just to annoy him, that he needed another button on his overcoat which was cut too low at the lapels.
PAST:
I got into the Porte Champerret bus. There were a lot of people in it, young, old, women, soldiers. I paid for my ticket and then looked around me. It wasn't very interesting. But finally I noticed a young man whose neck I thought was too long. I examined his hat and I observed that instead of a ribbon it had a plaited cord. Every time another passenger got on there was a lot of pushing and shoving. I didn't say anything, but all the same the young man with the long neck started to quarrel with his neighbor. I didn't hear what he said, but they gave each other some dirty looks. Then the young man with the long neck went and sat down in a hurry.
Coming back from the Porte Champerret I passed in front of the gare Saint‑Lazarre. I saw my young man having a discussion with a pal. The pal indicated a button just above the lapels of the young man's overcoat. Then the bus took me off and I didn't see them any more. I had a seat and I wasn't thinking about anything.
PRESENT:
At midday the heat coils round the feet of bus passengers. If, placed on a long neck, a stupid head adorned with a grotesque hat should chance to become inflamed, then a quarrel immediately breaks out. Very soon to become dissipated, however, in an atmosphere too heavy to carry ultimate insults very vividly from mouth to ear.
Thus one goes and sits down inside, where it's cool.
Later can be posed, in front of stations with double courtyards, sartorial questions about some button or other which fingers slimy with sweat self‑confidently fiddle with.
REPORTED SPEECH:
Dr. Queneau said that it had happened at midday. Some passengers had got into the bus. They had been squashed tightly together. On his head a young man had been wearing a hat which had been encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. He had had a long neck. He had complained to the man standing next to him about the continual jostling which the latter had been inflic ting on him. As soon as he had noticed a vacant seat, said Dr. Queneau, the young man had rushed off towards it and sat down upon it.
He had seen him later, Dr. Queneau continued, in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He had been wearing an overcoat, and a friend who had happened to be present had made a remark to him to the effect that he ought to put an extra button on the said overcoat.
PASSIVE:
It was midday. The bus was being got into by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman, which hat was encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. A long neck was one of the characteristics of the young gentleman. The man standing next to him was being grumbled at by the latter because of the jostling which was being inflicted on him by him. As soon as a vacant seat was espied by the young gentleman it was made the object of his precipitate movements and it become sat down upon.
The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the gare Saint‑Lazare. He was clothed in an overcoat and was having a remark made to him by a friend who happened to be there to the effect that it was necessary to have an extra button put on it.
ANTIPHRASIS:
Midnight. It's raining. The buses go by nearly empty. On the bonnet of an AI near the Bastille, an old man whose head is sunk in his shoulders and who isn't wearing a hat thanks a lady sitting a long way away from him because she is stroking his hands. Then he goes to stand on the knees of a man who is still sitting down.
Two hours earlier, behind the gare de Lyon, this old man was stopping up his ears so as not to hear a tramp who was refusing to say that he should slightly lower the bottom button on his underpants.
ABUSIVE:
After a stinking wait in the vile sun I finally got into a filthy bus where a bunch of bastards were squashed together. The most bastardly of these bastards was a pustulous creature with a ridiculously long windpipe who was sporting a grotesque hat with a cord instead of a ribbon. This pretentious puppy started to create because an old bastard was pounding his plates with senile fury, but soon he climbed down and made off in the direction of an empty seat that was still damp with the sweat of the buttocks of its previous owner.
Two hours later, my unlucky day, I came upon the same bastard holding forth with another bastard in front of that nauseating monument they call the gare Saint‑Lazare. They were yammering about a button. Whether he has his furuncle raised or lowered, I said to myself, he'll still be just as lousy, the dirty bastard.
Raymond Queneau's 'Arithmétique'
Raymond Queneau - Interview
Raymond Queneau à propos de "Zazie dans le métro"
Raymond Queneau - Manuscrit "Zazie dans le métro"
Oulipo Compendium (excerpts)Queneau quotes
Queneau's uptopian dream worlds
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems, published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 100,000,000,000,000 different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day. In 1997, a French court decision outlawed the publication on the Internet of this poem. The court decided that the son of Queneau and the Gallimard editions possessed an exclusive and moral right on this poem, thus outlawing any publication of it on the Internet and possibility for the reader to play Queneau's interactive game of poem construction. However, two online interactive versions do exist.
Stanley Chapman's version
Bevrowe's version
Buy the book
Further evidence
Saint Glinglin (Dalkey Archive) Queneau has created a world, starting with its banalities: the cliches, the tired small talk, the outdated prejudices, the little points of pride. This world, Home Town, is settled in its ways under perpetually blue skies and under the guidance of Nabonidus, its proud mayor. But the mayor's children, all corrupted by influences from Foreign Town, turn against both their father and the traditional ways. To say any more about the plot is to imply that there really is one. Like all of Queneau's books, this is much about language, both dry experimentation (the entire book is a lipogram--there are no X s) and full of neologisms and quirky style. -- PW
The Blue Flowers (New Directions)The Blue Flowers is the most lovable of all Raymond Queneau's novels. It relates two paralell narratives (or rather - and Queneau is the great mathematical novelist! - base and perpendicular narratives): the historical narrative of the endearingly aggressive Duc d'Auge, nay-sayer to royal authority and public opinion, friend of Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade, and debunker of religion to the extent of daubing on caves in the Perigord region to 'prove' the existence of humanity before Adam; his three daughters, including the defective, bleating Phelise, and their small-minded spouses; his squire Mouscaillot and their talking horses, philosophical Demosthenes and taciturn Stef; and his clerical foils, the abbes Biroton and Riphinte. -- Darragh O'Donoghue
Zazie dans le Metro (Penguin) Raymond Queneau has written a strange but tantalizing little novel about an adolescent named Zazie... she has a New York accent, and the mouth of a Henry Miller. Her misadventures in Paris, prove challenging to those around her,and amusing to the reader. It's a collage of seemimgly misplaced dialogue and eccentric characters, yet is easy to read and laugh with. Zazie is less of a labyrinth and more of a amusement park, a good introduction to this imaginative writer. -- Allen Greenbaum
We Always Treat Women too Well (NYRB)We Always Treat Women Too Well was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara, but this novel by Raymond Queneau is a further manifestation of his sly, provocative, wonderfully wayward genius. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.
The Flight of Icarus (New Directions) Hubert, a writer, has lost the main character to the novel he is, well was, writing. After viciously accusing friends and fellow writers of stealing Icarus, he hires the detective Morcol, "who has appeared in many novels under different names," to find him. Soon we meet Icarus, who is only 15 pages old and on his own in 1890 Paris, and begin to see the formation from what Hubert designed, to a real character through his first experience with absinthe, his girlfriend LN, his love of automobiles and bicycles, and his love of flying machines. -- Jeff O. ----
*
p.s. Hey from Tokyo theoretically where I'm probably less jet-lagged now and have something of an initial grip on this undoubtedly wondrous city. Speaking of wondrous, Raymond Queneau is your topic and entertainment du jour. Nice, right? I hope you're all doing really well.