Queneau, Raymond

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An Invitation to Play
Question your fragments...
Eye Opener for All Professions
Great and if you liked this. . .
The art of wordplay

Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0811207897

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A twentysomething bus rider with a long, skinny neck and a goofy hat accuses another passenger of trampling his feet; he then grabs an empty seat. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. The story is told as an official letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English." It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically. The result, as translator Barbara Wright writes in her introduction, is "a profound exploration into the possibilities of language." I'd say it's a refresher course of sorts, but it's more like a graduate seminar. After all, how many of us are familiar with terms such as litote, alexandrine, apheresis, and epenthesis in the first place?

Customer Reviews:

An Invitation to Play.......2007-04-22

The idea to collect exercises in rhetorical style is not exactly a new one. Classical Greek orators had their progymnasmata as part of the pedagogical curriculum, and a prolific Renaissance writer, like Erasmus in his De Copia, gives 200 stylistic diversions of two very banal sentences. The difference of Raymond Queneau's 20th century Exercises in Style, 1947, lies in the absence of a pedagogical intent and in the ironical distance to esthetic effect. A classical orator typically employs figures to trigger intended effects in his listeners, effects that have certain political, or judicial consequences, or at least show off the eloquence and encyclopedic erudition of the speaker. Queneau, though obviously as erudite as any Renaissance man, conducts rhetorical procedures like chemical experiments: If you fuse a banal story with certain preconceived linguistic styles, how will they react with each other? The results are sometimes predictable, sometimes refreshing, hilarious, very witty, incredibly boring, bombastic, nonsensical, bad.

Queneau's greatest achievement, the surprising linguistic diversity, is derived from a radical axiom: Let everything be language. Mathematics, philosophy, botany, zoology, music, medicine, all are treated for what they indeed are - subjective observation and affected rendering. The combination of a banal story with 99 rhetorical prototypes does not only show the story in different lights, dispels the illusion of its assumed banality, but it also casts an ironic spotlight on those prototypes themselves. Using philosophical terms, Hellenisms or apostrophe to describe a non-incident in a public bus will actually reveal the characteristic quality of such language, a quality we will not become aware of, if we encounter it in its proper realm.

Some rhetorical figures are employed parodistically and in an absolutely literal manner without any regard to poetic propriety. The result is wildly dadaistic; reminiscent, for example, of the verbal excesses in Mozart's "Baesle" letters or the galumphing portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. The demonic energy of ritual language is rediscovered. Obsessive playfulness.

Unfortunately the poetic perfection of a Jabberwocky is definitely absent in Queneau's experiments. This becomes painfully apparent in the "Haiku"--it's 5-7-5--but not a Haiku, and especially in the "Sonnet," a ghastly patchwork indeed, at least in the English translation. A truly artistic style can never be achieved by the mechanistic application of superficial devices. But of course, poetic perfection is not the point of these exercises. Their greatest charm lies in their playfulness and we are invited to play along. "Man plays only where he is man in the fullest sense of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays." [Schiller]

Question your fragments..........2006-10-27

This book, simple in parts, simply genius in others, delves into our perceptions of events filtered through the social archetypes of our thought. Is this a poem? Is this a narrative? Perhaps a list, a simple list. If you read this book, be prepared to think, on many levels, with a keen eye for the experimentation--which then was quite revolutionary--and ask yourself, who now would try such a daring experiment. Very few, I assure you.

The book explores the same story written in 99 different ways, 99 different styles, genres (maybe) and it gives rise to the question, "Could everything be viewed this way?" My trip to the grocer, was it a poem, a haiku maybe? Did my conversation with the butcher and the deli manager really occur as a sonnet? Except that the basic unit of this book isn't really even a story, it's just a fragment, which further adds to the complexity of the issue. Everything we encounter during the day, most of it anyway, is merely fragments of a larger story.

This book asks the question, quietly, and with tongue in cheek, "How do you view those fragments?"

Eye Opener for All Professions.......2006-02-24

I see after reading this book how many ways there are to present information in different and interesting ways. Forget my monotonous ways! I have found myself in my engineering profession writing technical presentations with a new awareness of the style of my presentation.

Exercises in style is fun to read on the bus or at home, and in moments of "writer's block." I read the styles a few at a time, and am constantly amazed at the variety of styles given a simple little story. This book is a "must read" for those looking to expand their creativity with almost no effort.

Great and if you liked this. . ........2003-10-17

I have always found this book to be fascinating and the perfect case for the argument of style/versus content. My classes have ended up screaming at each other in lively discussion of which of the two elements is more important and this book always provides a great catalyst for that discussion. I have, however, had students complain that this book is a little dry so if you are looking for another great book that accomplishes a very similar argument but seems to hold my class's interest better, try The Author by Hillary DePiano. I haven't seen it on Amazon yet but I know it is available on the author's website at hillarydepiano.com

The art of wordplay.......2003-04-24

I encountered "these exercises" for the first time 25 years ago. After a long trip we arrived at a friend abroad. Since alcohol had an all but positive effect on a couple of visiting family members, the theatrically very gifted host decided to pull a translation of Queneau's work off the shelve and to control the unruly crowd by reading/performing this entire work. It was a blast!

After coming across an essay mentioning that Queneau's encounter with Bach's art of the fugue prompted these linguistic style exercises, I picked up an original copy while visiting the city of light and have had many joyful reencounters since.

Together with Perec' "e-less" la Disparation, Queneau's "Exercises" remains the most popular Oulipo work. While I think that Queneau's influence on literature can be best compared to Schoenberg's invention of serialism in music, his exercises have the quick wit of a jolly Mozart. The work is light-hearted and entertaining, yet of significant substance. While Witgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" remains a hallmark in the analysis of the possibilities and limitations of language, it is dry and requires a significant investment of time and effort. The opposite is true for this book: even those not interested in the finer points of composition, grammar and syntax can still enjoy this virtuosic delight.

Book Description

The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever.

The Oulipo's original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers).

The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years.

Customer Reviews:

Reformatting The Muse.......2000-11-19

Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

Absolutely Hilarious.......2000-01-14

This book is a riot! I highly recommend it. All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, a group of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience.

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Zzzz...
How can I stop laughting?
great books of the modern world
"You've got some funny ideas, you know, for your age."
One of a kind (5 stars down for Barbara Wright)

Zazie in the Metro (Penguin Classics)
Raymond Queneau
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142180041
Release Date: 2001-10-30

Book Description

Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with Gabriel, her female-impersonator uncle. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, Zazie in the Metro remains as stylish and witty as ever.

Customer Reviews:

Zzzz..........2007-04-25

How to translate extemely funny French novel rooted in the Paris argot of the late forties? That is the problem. The answer, as to this seminal work of humorous 20th century fiction, is -if it can be translated into (American) English at all, perhaps the best shot would be some sort of heavy Scottish or Irish brogue; translating "Zazie" in standard English, simply does not fully satisfy (not to mention fail to cause bellyfuls of laughter). This brilliant novel requires something less rigid, and definitely outside of the limits of standard English. Even though B.W. does a good job, this almost requires different blood understanding in order to rend justice to the irrascible Zazou.

How can I stop laughting?.......2007-01-09

This book is hilarious from begining to end. Not extrange it was his most selling book in France. Again, the translation is wonderful.

great books of the modern world.......2006-11-03

one of the great modern books a must for anyone with any sense of humor and wit. if you are serious forget it. if you like french silly, read it

"You've got some funny ideas, you know, for your age.".......2006-05-07

Gabriel, a female impersonator at a Parisian nightclub has no idea what he's in for when he agrees to baby-sit his precocious niece, Zazie, for the weekend. Zazie isn't a 'normal' child by any stretch of the imagination. She's rude, mouthy, sarcastic, mischievous, willful, and determined--a complete brat who manages to insult everyone she meets. Zazie arrives in Paris obsessed with traveling on the Metro, but unfortunately, a strike makes that impossible. Uncle Gabriel gamely attempts to distract Zazie with other Parisian landmarks, but he's simply not dealing with an average child. Zazie isn't interested in the tomb of Napoleon, for example, and considers him an "old windbag."

Zazie is full of fantastic stories and claims that she witnessed her mother chopping her father up with an ax--an incident that Zazie argues was "enough to give me no end of complexes." Zazie however, is the last to feel any sort of trauma--she's the type who causes it. Zazie admits she wants to be a teacher when she grows up--but lest one should gain the wrong impression--she wants to be a teacher so she can beat up the "brats." And she's apparently mapped out her plan in some detail: "I'll make them lick the floor .... I'll kick their bottoms with my boots." Zazie's frustration with the Metro's inaccessibility and her subsequent actions spark a series of extremely funny and chaotic events.

The novel's introduction by Gilbert Adair, explains that in terms of affecting the author's career, "Zazie ... became Queneau's Lolita." "Zazie in the Metro" is considered a cult classic, and Queneau's style is certainly unique. His use of language is quite unlike anything I've read before--the characters talk in a great deal of slang, and the author clearly has a great time playing with language. The characters in the novel have no trouble understanding one another, and it just takes a few pages of exposure before the reader begins to feel perfectly comfortable with it too. Here's tutu-clad Unkoo Gabriel with his "professionally epilated thighs" introducing his performance of the Dying Swan: "Well, my lambs and you my lady sheep, you are at last about to have a glimpse of my talents .... I have made the choreographic art the principle pap of the udder of my revenue."

Zazie is the worst brat imaginable, but she's also a magnificent literary creation. She's perhaps how many of us would like to be--she combines the uninhibited behaviour of a child, with the uncanny knack of saying precisely the worst thing with precision timing. The novel is a peculiar, marvelously witty romp through the underbelly of Paris, and the story introduces a fantastic set of characters--a talking parrot, a group of enthusiastic tourists, the lonely widow Mouaque, the chameleon Trouscaillon, sad taxi driver Charles, and the "gentle" Marceline--displacedhuman

One of a kind (5 stars down for Barbara Wright) .......2005-11-10

I have had the pleasure to be introduced to a lot of French authors such as Vian, Queneau, Sartr, Bataille and others and I have found each one of them extremely fascinating and intricate. The majority of Queneau's work I have read in Bulgarian and he has become a favourite of mine, however I am quite disappointed with Barbara Wright's translations. I could barely finish reading Exercises in style. I fell offended by the literary translation and its bluntness. As much as I love the author, I'll never be able to get any of his books unless I find another translation, and that is a pitty...It's a shame since I wanted to get a bunch of my friends acquainted with his work.

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A very important book in the development of modern fiction.
The risks of chance

Pierrot Mon Ami (French Literature)
Raymond Queneau
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0916583406

Book Description

Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity. This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau's principle translator).

Customer Reviews:

A very important book in the development of modern fiction........2001-06-21

'Pierrot mon ami' was written around the same time as Celine's 'Guignol's Band', and, like that controversial classic, features a passive innocent on the margins of society, with carnies, circus acts, petty ex-criminals, mad artists - at one point, like Ferdinand, Pierrot becomes an assistant to a fake fakir.

'Pierrot' has slightly more reference to the Occupation than Queneau's other novels in the period - a fire razing a giant amusement arcade is said to have been started by one of the attractions, burning chairoplanes; an uproarious journey with a boar and a chimp is arguably a figure for anti-Semitism; a bottle of Vichy water is pronounced disgusting.

Another point of reference might be Sartre's famous short story 'The Wall'. Pierrot's imprisonment may be more metaphorical than actual - he is condemned to walk the same streets every day; on the one occasion he leaves, the rest of the book's cast go with him, while the strangers he meet used to work in the area - but it provokes the same Nietzchean laughter.

I point this out to show how much 'Pierrot' is of its time - Queneau is often dismissed for refusing to 'engage'. In any case, 'Pierrot' is a supremely anti-Nazi book, with its shifting perspectives, its formal games, its narrative and semantic gaps, its instability of character, refusing the reader the reassurance of fixity or authority.

But if 'Pierrot' is of its time, it's also ahead of it. Together with Nabokov's 'The Real life of Sebastian Knight' and Borges' Ficciones, Queneau was at this moment pioneering anti-detective fiction, that genre later populated by Pynchon, Calvino, Eco, Sciascia et al, where the conventional rules of the detective story are invoked (a mystery, investigation), but its ideological function is displaced (resolution, restoration of social order).

'Pierrot' is full of mysteries - who was the woman Jojo Mouilliminche died for? Who was the Paldovian prince whose tomb Mouzzenergues faithfully curates? Who burned the Uni-Park where philosophers pay and brawl to see brief glimpses of female flesh, the hero is sporadically employed, and where he meets the boss's daughter who will sleep with everyone but him (well, he is a pierrot)? Are these things connected? There is a proliferation of clues, coincidences and patterns, but, perhaps because of the Occupation, there is less faith in the restorative powers of the genre.

Instead of fixing things in their proper place, 'Pierrot' is a book that celebrates play - every character is in some way connected to performance, and their every appearance is like a 'bit' or 'act' on the novel's stage.

The risks of chance.......2000-05-24

Pierrot turns away from CHOICE to follow coincidence, chance meetings, crossed paths, to follow, dream-like, the destiny that will take him accross France with a tame monkey and a wild boar... A book dedicated to the peace of accepting the direction life sets us, instead of stiding, giant steps, to determine a false life for ourselves.

We Always Treat Women Too Well (New York Review Books Classics)

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"Was it in good taste to kill a woman by means of bombs?"
The Irish by the French
Irish revolution viewed from a bank...

We Always Treat Women Too Well (New York Review Books Classics)
Raymond Queneau
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 159017030X
Release Date: 2003-01-31

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

"Was it in good taste to kill a woman by means of bombs?".......2006-06-08

French author Raymond Queneau's language wizardry is at play once again in the book "We Always Treat Women Too Well", but in other ways the novel is a strange departure from his normal fare. The novel is set in Dublin Ireland in 1916, during the Easter Rebellion and concerns a group of seven Irish Republican Army members who storm a post office at the corner of Sackville Street and Eden Quay. After throwing out the female employees, murdering the doorman, and the head of the post office--Theodore Durand, the IRA members prepare for the British to surrender.

There's only one problem--inside the ladies' toilet is the comely Gertie Girdle. When she's finally discovered, she finds herself the object of some interest. One of the IRA members is quite besotted, and meanwhile, her fiance Commodore Sidney Cartwright is outside laying siege to the building....

The book, originally published under the pseudonym Sally Mara includes an introduction from John Updike in which he stresses that "We Always Treat Women Too Well" is supposed to be a comic spoof of [...] popular novels. The novel contains Queneau's usual highly original and playful approach to language, so that helps with the humour part. The IRA members are mostly named after minor characters in Ulysses, and use the password "Finnegan's Wake." However, given the incidents described, any comic element was often lost on me. For example, in the first chapter, the post office is invaded, and the doorman shouts out "God save the King." Facing the armed IRA members, the doorman says this phrase 3 times--and with each repetition, his voice becomes a little weaker, and yes, that's amusing. But then this incident is followed with a description of his murder:
"Corny Kelleher had wasted no time in injecting a bullet in his noggin. The dead doorman vomited his brains through an eighth orifice in his head, and fell flat on the floor." To this reader, at least, the passage holds no humour whatsoever, and the depiction of violence entwined with comedy is an exercise in macabre bad taste that is ultimately very jarring and disturbing.

There are many other examples of this union of humour and cruel horrific incidents. In another instance the British shoot a woman who worked in the post office when she arrives to retrieve her handbag. She lays sprawled out, legs apart with her skirts blowing in the breeze. Some of the IRA members want to cover up her body, and others feels strangely aroused by her position--which to them--suggests sexual activity.

Gertie's insistence on seeing herself as a romantic heroine is amusing, but unfortunately these passages don't really compensate for everything else. While "We Always Treat Women Too Well" can be labeled 'black humour' the book is ultimately unappealing--displacedhuman

The Irish by the French.......2003-12-25

All of the characters in this work are minor characters in Joyce's Ulysses. Yet, this is another day, another event, and the relation to Joyce is only one of names, or is it?
This is work of frank sex and violence. The heroine? A nymphette. Who wins and are the revolutionaries really bad people? Queneau leaves that question open, prefering to unfurl the problematics of human relations in what can only be described as an unusual circumstance.
Read it.

Irish revolution viewed from a bank..........1998-09-11

Irish revolutionnaries in Dublin. They try to invest the city. We follow a group of them in a bank. And a young woman trapped in the "lavatories" (in english in the text) fiancée of an english captain... A story of innocent people who tempted to enter the history. Written in a fresh and joyful language.

Customer Reviews:

An Allegory of Protection unto Death.......2007-06-23

This allegory of good, bad and over-concern is narrated by a psychiatrist named Timortis (Timor Mortis) who comes upon this unknown village in an unknown country in an unknown time. Somethings in the village are familiar but many are not and assumptions have to be made as to who is what and what is who. Timortis enters a house in the village in which a woman is about to give birth (she has three sons: a set of twins named Joel and Noel and a single named Alfa Romeo). He ends up staying with the family for years (maybe eight, it hard to say) but only psychoanalyses the nanny who thinks the word is a euphemism for sex.

There are odd going ons in the town such as an "Old People's Market" and a church at which the Priest has a curate who is a devil and they battle for the amusement of the villagers. But all this is an afterthought to the trials and tribulations of the mother, whose only thoughts are how to protect her children from everyday problems that escalate up to how to protect them from meteorites.

The book is a study of the ends to which love can drive people and how love cannot only be stifling, it can be downright dangerous.

Great French Classic.......2007-05-13

Another Boris Vian even better than all the rest. Broaden your horizons and read this!

Utterly fascinating.......2005-07-19

Sometimes funny, often disturbing, thoroughly unique, and utterly fascinating. A psychoanalyst goes looking for desires to analyze because he lacks any of his own. He settles in a very bizarre and rather brutal village where shame is forbidden, horses are crucified, old folks auctioned, and a woman makes love at long distance with the blacksmith via a robotic spitting image of herself. Very weird, but not in the usual way. It's all presented so matter of factly, with such a straight face, that the effect is unlike any other literature of its kind.

"He propelled himself towards some particular piece of debris that was floating on the top and picked it up expertly between his teeth. It was a tiny hand. Covered with inkstains. He climbed back on board again. 'Tut, tut,' he said when he looked at it. 'Old Charlie's boy's been refusing to do his homework again."

"Somebody perfectly free has no urge to do anything at all.".......2004-01-08

In descriptions so richly imagined that he sometimes has to invent new words, Boris Vian brings to life the strange world discovered by a wandering traveler, Timortis, a psychiatrist who has been born an adult and has no memories of his own. An "empty vessel," he believes that if he can learn everything there is to know about someone through psychoanalysis, he can bring about a transferrence of identity and make his own life more complete. When he hears the cries of Clementine, a village woman giving birth to triplets, he stops to give aid and ends up delivering her sons--Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo.

Though the birthing scene is humorous, the full satirical flavor and the allegorical construction of this novel do not unfold until Timortis travels into the village. There he discovers that he has arrived just in time for the Old Folks Fair, at which old people are auctioned off like cattle and treated like them. Later Timortis visits a shop where he sees a child being worked to the verge of death, then revived with icewater. Farm animals, however, are given days off when they behave themselves and allowed to hitchhike if they need rides. A scapegoat, named Glory Hallelujah, retrieves putrid, decaying things from a blood-red stream with his teeth, his job being to "swallow the shame of the whole village." The vicar announces that "God is not utilitarian. God is a birthday present...a luxury, a tasseled cushion made of beaten gold." A horse is crucified for his sexual depravity. Additional bizarre episodes abound, leaving the reader to ponder the meaning of the non-stop action, at the same time that s/he is whisked along by the speed of Vian's prose to new and still more surprising events.

Puns, word play, and literary inventions fill the novel, even as Vian's often lyrical sentences and vibrant descriptions set the scenes. Satirizing the existing world for some of its most obvious faults, Vian presents a remarkably open-ended allegory, which makes the reader think at the same time that s/he often laughs at the absurdities and winces at the truths. But this is no full-blown alternative universe created to illustrate a serious and specific political or social agenda. Here Vian symbolically smiles at the reader as he leads Timortis through this strange community from episode to episode, illustrating his own opinions in a more or less random way, having fun all the time, while making some serious points. Not scholarly, though highly literate, this is a book for which one must buckle up, sit back, and just enjoy the ride. Mary Whipple

Witch Grass
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A French subrealism

Wonderful, delightful, marvellous

Witch Grass
Raymond Queneau
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Queneau, Raymond | ( Q ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

We Always Treat Women Too Well (New York Review Books Classics)

The Blue Flowers (New Directions Paperbook)

Zazie in the Metro (Penguin Classics)

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Exercises in Style

ASIN: 1590170318
Release Date: 2003-01-31

Book Description

Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts of the city of lights. Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing book about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.

Customer Reviews:

A French subrealism.......2007-01-09

Raymond Queneau is a first class writer and it is very strange that is not famous. His translator also is very good and was able to retain the intentions of the writer. Queneau is a subrealist that has nothing to envy to the Latin American writers of the boom. He also is hilarious and there s always something else besides the first reading, that shows a French intelectual of first rate.

Wonderful, delightful, marvellous.......2005-09-02

I can't begin to explain why this book is so delightful. There are plenty of places to start with Queneau--perhaps the lighter, more accessibly funny Zazie is the best introduction--but this is my favorite. As with all of Queneau, it's a mix of silliness, absurdity, surreality, and philosophicality. He's a former philosophy student in the Hegelian tradition, but by way of the Marx brothers rather than Karl.

Like the Marx brothers, Queneau's storylines are trifles usually--but it's hard to care since his books still manage to be so uniquely humorous and thought-provoking. I won't try to explain it, but this book is such a perfect case of Queneau's marvellous ability to mix philosophy and comedy, fairy tales and tragedy, that it's a must read.

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Authors

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