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Stories and Remarks book cover
Stories and Remarks
1981
First Published
3.61
Average Rating
244
Number of Pages

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' 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 lifetime, 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. Destiny—When the mind ... — A bit of glory—Panic—A young Frenchman by the name of so-and-so, I, II—Dino—At the forest's edge—In passing—Alice in France—The Cafe de la France—Green with fright—The Trojan horse—Preface to Émile Bauwens' Book of cocktails — (On the proper use of tranquilizers), I, II—Some brief remarks relative to the aerodynamic properties of addition—Conversations in greater Paris—Manners of speaking—Texticles—A story of your own—On some imaginary animal languages and on the dog language in Sylvie and Bruno in particular—Dream accounts aplenty.

Avg Rating
3.61
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Author

Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Author · 25 books

Novelist, poet, and critic Raymond Queneau, was born in Le Havre in 1903, and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André 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, and 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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