Barbara Wright

On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew a new button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style, Queneu’s experimental masterpiece and a hallmark book of the OULIPO literary group, retells this unexceptional tale in ninety-nine exceptional ways, employing writing styles such as the sonnet and the alexandrine, onomatopoeia and even Cockney.

A 65th Anniversary Edition includes twenty-five exercises by Queneau never before published in English translated by Chris Clarke, as well as new exercises by contemporary writers Jesse Ball, Blake Butler, Amelia Gray, Shane Jones, Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, Harry Mathews, Lynne Tillman, Frederic Tuten, and Enrique Vila-Matas.

Here is a book that is elegant, good-humored, innocent, perverse, poetic, funny, extravagant, preposterous, limpid, insouciant, and philosophic. It has led readers to invoke comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Cocteau, La Fontaine, Ronald Firbank, Giraudoux, Julien Gracq, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire. In 1974, when it was published in France, it won for its twenty-five-year-old author wide critical acclaim and the first Prix de l’Insolite. In sum, a one-of-a-kind delight. In an imagined Lithuania––a country less melancholy, less menacing than Transylvania––where if it is not raining, it is probably snowing, a very odd family resides in a Neo-Gothic chateau surrounded by an overgrowth of trees, vines, and general miasmic verdure. We meet grandfather Emeric, who spends his time collecting one thing or another; Grandmother Casimira, who reads and embroiders; family retainer Baba Sonine, who has something surprising under her multifarious petticoats; the damsel Kinga, prone to migraines, and her adolescent, myopic (everyone in this Lithuania is myopic) brother, our narrator Max-Ulrich. Nothing much happens in their lives. They take things as they come and are always cheerful… Then appears the cat Dæmon! Gentle reader, not a demon but a manifestation of the spirit the ancients supposed presided over the actions of mankind and watched over their most secret intentions. Incongruous and astonishing events ensue as the Great She-Cat grows ever larger on her diet of vegetables and Continental desserts––a diet possibly supplemented during her solitary twilight strolls––children are said to have occasionally disappeared…

The Blue Flowers follows two unlikely characters: Cidrolin, who alternates between drinking and napping on a barge parked along the Seine in the 1960s, and the Duke d’Auge as he rages through history—about 700 years of it—refusing to crusade, clobbering his king with a cannon, and dabbling in alchemy. But is it just a coincidence that the Duke appears only when Cidrolin is dozing? And vice versa? As Raymond Queneau explains: “There is an old Chinese saying: ‘I dream that I am a butterfly and pray there is a butterfly dreaming he is me.’ The same can be said of the characters in this novel—those who live in the past dream of those who live in the modern era—and those who live in the modern era dream of those who live in the past.”

Channeling Villon and Céline, Queneau attempts to bring the language of the French streets into common literary usage, and his mad wordplays, puns, bawdy jokes, and anachronistic wackiness have been kept amazingly and glitteringly intact by the incomparable translator Barbara Wright.

On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this unexceptional tale ninety-nine times, employing the sonnet and the alexandrine, “Ze Frrench” and “Cockney.” An “Abusive” chapter heartily deplores the events; “Opera English” lends them grandeur. In 1947, when Exercises in Style first appeared in French, it led to Queneau’s election to the highly prestigious Académie des Goncourt. He once told Barbara Wright that of all of his books, this was the one he most wished to see translated. He rendered her his “heartiest congratulations,” adding: “I have always thought that nothing is untranslatable. Here is new proof. And it is accomplished with all the intended humor. It has not only linguistic knowledge and ingenuity, it also has that.”

We Always Treat Women Too Well was for many years a secret work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most highly regarded French literary figures of this century. As a novelist, poet, scholar, mathematician and philosopher, he tackled some of the most serious scientific and philosophical problems of our age with insight and erudition while also writing witty and stylistically experimental fiction that has earned him a popular readership. We Always Treat Women Too Well was first presented to the public under the guise of a novel by a young Irish writer, Sally Mara, translated into French by “Michael Presle,” the pseudonym Queneau adapted partly as a joke, and partly because the apparently obscene content of the book might have been misunderstood at the time. Now, at last, in this elegant translation by Barbara Wright, the novel can be seen for what it is: a satirical masterpiece set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising. It is the story of the siege of a small post office overlooking the Liffey, taken by a group of rebels, who find to their embarrassment that a female postal clerk, rejoicing in the name Gertie Girdle, is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or expelled the rest of the staff and the siege has begun. The events that follow are not for prudish readers, because it is not just blood that flows, but the narrative is always scintillating, fast moving, linguistically delightful—and humorous in a way that stretches from dry wit to the hilarious.

The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), the late Raymond Queneau’s tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country, in a translation by Barbara Wright. Critics are universally agreed that it and the later Zazie dans le métro (1959) show Queneau at his zaniest and most cheerful, and it is not surprising that both these novels have been made into popular and successful films. But as always with Queneau, beneath the apparent absurdities of plot and the bumbling of his rather ordinary characters, there is a precision of structure and purpose that, ironically enough, places the work of this earliest of new-wave novelists squarely in the tradition of the eighteenth-century roman philosophique. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Brû, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naïf. Highly self-conscious yet reasonably satisfied with his lot, imbued with the good humor inherent in the naturally wise, Valentin meets the painful nonsense of life’s adventures with a slightly bewildered detachment. As Barbara Wright so aptly writes: “Though The Sunday of Life is set in one of the most traumatic of recent periods––1936-40, the dark years leading up to the Second World War and including the fall of France… it nevertheless does indeed manage to be one of Queneau’s happiest, sunniest, and most undated novels: it far transcends anything like a mere chronicle of times.”

Called by some the French Borges, by others the creator of le nouveau roman a generation ahead of its time, Raymond Queneau’s work in fiction continues to defy strict categorization. The Flight of Icarus (Le Vol d’lcare) is his only novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions. Consciously parodying Pirandello and Robbe-Grillet, it begins with a novelist’s discovery that his principal character, Icarus by name, has vanished. This, in turn, sets off a rash of other such disappearances. Before long, a number of desperate authors are found in search of their fugitive characters, who wander through the Paris of the 1890s, occasionally meeting one another, and even straying into new novels. Icarus himself — perhaps following the destiny his name suggests — develops a passion for horseless carriages, kites, and machines that fly. And throughout the almost vaudevillian turns of the plot, we are aware, as always, of Queneau’s evident delight at holding the thin line between farce and philosophy.