The Sunday of Life by Raymond Queneau

The Sunday of Life by Raymond Queneau

The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), 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 a translation by Barbara Wright. Critics are universally agreed that it and the later Zazie dans le métro (1959) show Queneau at his zaniest and most cheerful, and it is not surprising that both these novels have been made into popular and successful films. But as always with Queneau, beneath the apparent absurdities of plot and the bumbling of his rather ordinary characters, there is a precision of structure and purpose that, ironically enough, places the work of this earliest of new-wave novelists squarely in the tradition of the eighteenth-century roman philosophique. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Brû, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naïf. 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. As Barbara Wright so aptly writes: “Though The Sunday of Life is set in one of the most traumatic of recent periods––1936-40, the dark years leading up to the Second World War and including the fall of France… it nevertheless does indeed manage to be one of Queneau’s happiest, sunniest, and most undated novels: it far transcends anything like a mere chronicle of times.”

Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) is acknowledged as one of the most influential of modern French writers, having helped determine the shape of twentieth-century French literature, especially in his role with the Oulipo, a group of authors that includes Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews, among others. Barbara Wright has translated several Raymond Queneau novels; indeed, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, she "has waltzed around the floor with the Master so many times by now that she follows his quirky French as if the steps were in English." She has also translated works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras. She lives in London.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780811206464
ISBN 10	0811206467
Titel	The Sunday of Life
Autor	Raymond Queneau
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Erscheinungsjahr	1977-02-01
Seitenanzahl	196
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar