Raymond Queneau was a poet and writer whose intense interest in mathematics flavored many of his works. He cofounded an artistic group called Ouvroir de litterature potentielle (Oulipo--Workshop of Potential Literature) that still influences artists by...

Raymond Queneau has been celebrated as one of the most amusing and versatile French writers of the twentieth century. He was a poet, novelist, critic, editor, playwright, filmmaker, philosopher, mathematician, and even a painter. He is best known as a...

Raymond Queneau's work is difficult to classify. Set to music by the Frères Jacques, his Exercices de style (1947; translated as Exercises in Style, 1958) earned him a reputation as something of a comedian. That reputation was confirmed by the...

In all his novels, Raymond Queneau questions the process of history. Individual lives are drawn into historical disasters…. Les Fleurs bleues stands out as one novel in which history, as it relates individual and group experience, does not appear only in the dénouement…. Queneau makes no pretense to careful observation and recording of social mores. Rather, he examines the metaphysics of history, the rapport between general and particular circumstance, between event, experience and inve...

Queneau's Exercices de style (1947) is an intriguing and at times immensely amusing book, but it is just what its title implies, a set of exercises; and to suggest, as George Steiner has done, that it constitutes a major landmark in twentieth-century literature, is to mislead readers in the interest of promoting literary "future shock." The instance of Exercices de style is worth pausing over briefly because it represents one ultimate limit of the whole self-conscious mode. Queneau begi...

Nathaniel Hawthorne said that happiness is like a butterfly that evades you if you chase it and may light on you if you sit down. The Sunday of Life is a novel about a man whom happiness follows like Hawthorne's butterfly. The report of how this marvel occurs is so droll that one could read it as a … smile—which would miss the larger wonder of how playfulness turns serious, which we often call art…. [Like] some of the better French wines, [Queneau's] fiction doesn't...