Raymond Queneau (1903–1976)

Os fatos pitorescos e absurdos da curta visita de Zazie a Paris.

Precursor do humor absurdo, este livro conta a estória da impertinente, desbocada e independente Zazie, uma pré-adolescente que vai visitar Paris com o único objetivo de andar de metrô. Nesta viagem, ela encontra as mais variadas e inverossímeis personagens, sempre em uma atmosfera desleixada e indefinível.

Queneau brinca muito com palavras e expressões e tem um estilo fluente e cômico. Na mistura de tipos e situações show more disparatadas ele consegue levar o leitor a divertir-se, cair na gargalhada mesmo. Entre os malucos que caminham pelo livro temos um tarado elegante, um travesti filósofo que não conhece os pontos turísticos de Paris e uma viúva iludida e inescrupulosamente disponível. Os diálogos engraçadíssimos e inteligentes e o humor diferente (para a época) tornam este um livro que vale a pena ser lido. show less

This was an unfinished and undated manuscript, never published during Queneau's lifetime: a complicated crime story obviously inspired by the famous Fantômas series (1911-1963), but with bizarre elements that are straight out of Queneau's surreal imagination, like the seventeen giant octopuses, one of which descends from the top of the Eiffel Tower to squash a traffic policeman, or the man in an orangutang suit in a carnival parade who turns out to be an actual orangutang. Or the car chase show more in which the chasing car and its occupants turn out to be identical to those being chased. All very strange, and of course it's impossible to know which of the many inconsistencies in the plot are deliberate and which are due to the unfinished state of the story. But fun, in a bizarre way. show less

Some books are clever in theory but dull in execution, whether due to the abstruseness of the underlying ideas or some incapacity of the writer. Exercises In Style is not one of those; even in translation (performed ably by Barbara Wright), it's obvious that this is one of those books that came out just as the author intended. While the underlying conceit may seem a bit lame, the underlying product is quite funny and enjoyable.

The central conceit is that Queneau takes a boring, everyday show more scene - the unnamed narrator watches two other men jostle for space on a bus, and then later sees one of them again being given fashion advice - and describes it in 99 different ways. Each form can be something as simple as changing the verb tenses to set the scene in the past, more complex such as various poetic styles, or just funny as in Cockney accents or pig Latin. Each different style emphasizes either a different facet of the encounter or a different way of perceiving the action, bringing to mind McLuhan's famous "the medium is the message" dictum. Sometimes the particular style will be almost unintelligible (I'm thinking of ones like the arrangements of permutations of certain numbers of letters), but since every detail of the scene becomes intimately familiar very quickly, the nuances of each particular descriptive technique take center stage. This is a book truly immune to spoilers, but enriched by repetition.

In terms of novelty, it reminds me of Pynchon's later "You never did the Kenosha Kid" scene in Gravity's Rainbow, though apparently it actually has more in common with chapter 33 of Erasmus' De Copia, where Erasmus comes up with 195 different ways to write the sentence "Your letter pleased me greatly" as part of a demonstration of technique. Regardless of provenance or influence or originality, my main takeaway is that this is a really creative way to emphasize the arbitrariness of presentation - there are an almost infinite number of ways to tell a story, and Queneau is showing so many to demonstrate that true artistry lies in selecting the right one (perhaps Flaubert's line about "le mot juste" should be amended to "le style juste" in this case). Most of these styles are obviously unsuitable for a "normal" novel, yet the concept of an entire novel being told in the form of a cross-examination, for example, seems like it could stimulate the right sort of author looking for inspiration.

There is no "point" to the book - I'm not sure I'd call it a novel - beyond its display of rhetorical technique, but even this formal exercise is engaging over its course, and even if some of the styles don't quite translate (Wright quite reasonably chooses analogous English modes in some instances, which of course provokes further thoughts on the question of limits of style beyond language), the book shows that a clever writer can make even the simplest idea and the simplest story entertaining. show less

As you'd expect from a posthumous collection of short pieces spanning most of Queneau's career, this is a bit patchy. There are some absolutely brilliant short pieces — in particular "Alice en France" (where else could she find somewhere stranger than Wonderland or the Looking-glass?), the essay discussing the often-neglected effect of the wind on addition, the delightfully random fragments of overheard dialogue, and the "Texticules" — but there are also pieces where I couldn't work out show more what Queneau was trying to achieve. My copy is a cheapo "folio" paperback without any critical apparatus, so you can never be quite sure if a piece was meant to be like that, or was simply unfinished, which adds to the fun.

It was interesting to see how Queneau's interests shifted from experiments with meaning and narrative in the earlier part of the book to playing around with the patterns and sounds of language in the later works. The "Texticules" are the most famous examples of this. Not really prose poems, because a poem uses structures and patterns in language to support the meaning the poet is trying to convey, whereas Queneau starts out with an oddity of language (homophones, bizarre rhymes and assonances, bad puns, sentences in which the only vowel is "u", etc.) and then constructs a meaning to exploit that oddity. The more offbeat and unlikely the combination of ideas he needs in order to get there, the better. Great fun, and even with my fairly basic knowledge of French I had the feeling that they were taking me into subtleties of the way language works I wouldn't otherwise have thought about. show less