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Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond
Queneau’s finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel
concerning a young man’s initiation into a world filled with
deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a
Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women’s skirts to
the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and
unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for
the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles
about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity. This
“innocent†implies how his story, at almost every turn,
undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us
with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously
skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau’s
principle translator).
Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a
salacious, black humorous and meaningful story by the influential
and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’
begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives
with her mother, older brother and younger sister in south central
Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is
writing in ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and
just departed French tutor, a professional polyglot linguist. To
impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write
a novel of some kind in Irish. However, the action throughout is
determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance of the
mysteries of sex and reproduction. The often sensual and dark
humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language and
languages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to
maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of course with Dublinese.
Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur
throughout; these are not translated but, like some challenging
French phrases, are supported by footnotes. In 1949, when Raymond
Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under the
pseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by
James Joyce and fascinated by the limitations of language. He was
also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion,
publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal
intime.
On a crowded bus at midday, the narrator observes one man accusing
another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the
first man takes it. Later, in another part of town, the man is
spotted again, while being advised by a friend to have another
button sewn onto his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this
apparently unremarkable tale ninety-nine times, employing a variety
of styles, ranging from sonnet to cockney to mathematical formula.
Too funny to be merely a pedantic thesis, this virtuoso set of
themes and variations is a linguistic rustremover, a guide to
literary forms and a demonstration of imagery and inventiveness.
Unreeling like a series of film clips recorded during a stroll
through Paris, Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets is wickedly
funny. It is also a bittersweet meditation on the effects of time
and memory. Hitting the Streets is Queneau's love letters to Paris
- a Paris that is always in the process of becoming obsolete. This
lively, idiomatic version is the first complete translation
available in English.
"This collection of Kojeve's thoughts about Hegel
constitutes one of the few important philosophical books of
the twentieth century—a book, knowledge of which is
requisite to the full awareness of our situation and to the
grasp of the most modern perspective on the eternal questions
of philosophy."—Allan Bloom (from the Introduction) During the
years 1933–1939, the Russian-born and German-educated Marxist
political philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) brilliantly
explicated—through a series of lectures—the philosophy of Hegel
as it was developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This collection
of lectures—originally compiled by Raymond Queneau and edited for
its English-language translation by Allan Bloom—shows the
intensity of Kojève's study and thought and the depth of his
insight into Hegel's Phenomenology. More important—for Kojève
was above all a philosopher and not an ideologue—this profound
and venturesome work on Hegel will expose the readers to the
excitement of discovering a great mind in all its force and power.
Set in a bizarre and slightly sinister town where the elderly are
auctioned off at an Old Folks Fair, the townspeople assail the
priest in hopes of making it rain, and the official town scapegoat
bears the shame of the citizens by fishing junk out of the river
with his teeth. Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most
serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who
punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of
giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly
obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an
invisible wall around their property.
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The Sunday of Life (Paperback)
Raymond Queneau; Translated by Barbara Wright
bundle available
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R273
R236
Discovery Miles 2 360
Save R37 (14%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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When shop-owner Julia Segovia decides that she's going to marry the
handsome if exceedingly young and naive soldier Valentin Bru, he
willingly goes along with her scheme. Little does he know that he
will have to contend with disgruntled in-laws, eccentric locals, a
cunning wife, a shifty career in fortune-telling, the approaching
threat of war with Germany and the mysteries of Parisian public
transport. With a cast of eccentric characters, amusing incidents
and an uplifting tone, The Sunday of Life - its title playfully
alluding to Hegel's theory of history - is a scintillating novel
which showcases Queneau's trademark punning, sly wit and delight in
the absurdity of people and situations.
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The Blue Flowers (Paperback)
Raymond Queneau; Translated by Barbara Wright
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R418
R351
Discovery Miles 3 510
Save R67 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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 Celine,
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.
Published originally as the purported French translation of a novel
by fictional Irish writer Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women Too
Well is set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising and tells the
story of the siege of a small post office by a group of rebels, who
discover to their embarrassment that a female postal clerk, Gertie
Girdle, is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or
expelled the rest of the staff. The events that follow are not for
prudish readers, forming a scintillating, linguistically delightful
and hilarious narrative. By far Queneau's bawdiest work, We Always
Treat Women Too Well contains all of its author's hallmarks: wit,
stylistic innovation and formal playfulness - expertly rendered
into English by Barbara Wright's classic translation.
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Zazie in the Metro (Paperback)
Raymond Queneau; Translated by Barbara Wright
bundle available
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R293
R237
Discovery Miles 2 370
Save R56 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers 'Don't
give a damn,' says Zazie, 'what I wanted was to go in the metro'
Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to
stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the
metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for
other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure
that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's
cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle.
Packed full of word play and phonetic games, Zazie in the Metro
remains as stylish and witty as ever.
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The Flight of Icarus (Paperback)
Raymond Queneau; Translated by Barbara Wright
bundle available
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R269
R219
Discovery Miles 2 190
Save R50 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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In late-nineteenth-century Paris, the writer Hubert is shocked to
discover that Icarus, the protagonist of the new novel he's working
on, has vanished. Looking for him among the manuscripts of his
rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is hired to find
the runaway character, who is now in Montparnasse, where he learns
to drink absinthe and is picked up by a friendly prostitute. These
hilarious adventures make Queneau's novel, presented in the form of
a script and parodying various genres, one of the best literary
jeux d'esprit in modern literature.
The Sunday of Life, 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 the ingenuous ex-Private
Valentin Bru, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has
created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naif. 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.
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Stories and Remarks (Paperback)
Raymond Queneau; Translated by Marc Lowenthal; Preface by Michel Leiris
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R342
Discovery Miles 3 420
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Stories and Remarks collects the best of Raymond Queneau's shorter
prose. The works span his career and include short stories, an
uncompleted novel, melancholic and absurd essays, occasionally
baffling "Texticles", a pastiche of Alice in Wonderland, and his
only play. Talking dogs, boozing horses, and suicides come head to
head with ruminations on the effects of aerodynamics on addition,
rhetorical dreams, and a pioneering example of permutational
fiction influenced by computer language. Also included is Michel
Leiris's preface from the French edition, an introduction by the
translator, and endnotes addressing each piece individually.
Raymond Queneau -- polyglot, novelist, philosopher, poet,
mathematician, screenwriter, and translator -- was one of the most
significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work
touches on many of the major literary movements of his life-time,
from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He
also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians
dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the
application of constraint.
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