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 travel well. It has an ambiguous philosophic cast that doesn't square with conventional Anglo-Saxon morality.

Furthermore, Queneau doesn't really write stories. He writes points of view. He illustrates ideas, most of which come from Queneau's romance with Hegel. The essence of spirit is freedom. War defines mankind. We cannot reach truth without passing through contradictions. Some of this Queneau believes. Some he spoofs...