Odile (French Literature) - Softcover

Queneau, Raymond; Sanders, Carol

3.72

326 ratings by Goodreads

9781564782090: Odile (French Literature)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782093 ISBN 13: 9781564782090

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

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First published in France in 1937, this brilliant, moving novel is about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, and about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellecturals and artists whose activities range from writing for radical magazines to conjuring the ghost of Lenin in seances. Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been one of the most powerful forces in shaping the direction of French fiction in the past fifty years. His other novels includes The Last Days, Pierrot Mon Ami, and Saint Glinglin.

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Review:

"A marvelous sendup of the Surrealists of the late 1920s and early 1930s as well as a moving love story...Both a madcap roman a clef... and a parable about the search for spiritual equilibrium and human meaning." -- Kirkus "Written in a cool detached style, full of witticisms and puns, this is Queneau at his most accessible." -- PW

About the Author:

Queneau was born in Le Havre in 1903 and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined Andr� Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, his intentionality.

Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

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