Queneau confesses his debt to Céline and Joyce, but we probably ought to situate him closer to Nabokov than to either. There is a similar word-play, of course, but there are also similar touches of sentimentality, a similar aloofness, a similar elegance, and the same dim view of history. The Sunday of Life was Queneau's tenth novel, published in 1952, and if it doesn't quite have the verve of Zazie, it has almost everything else that makes Queneau such an appealing and elusive writer….

If there isn't much room for high moral exploits in Queneau's world, it is not because he is a cynic, or because he wishes, as Barbara Wright suggests in her introduction to The Sunday of Life, to portray "humble characters" or to stay close to "the common man." It is because high morality is almost always spouted by frauds, and people who live in...