Les fleurs bleues by Raymond Queneau

Les fleurs bleues by Raymond Queneau

At his death in 1976, Raymond Queneau was one of France's most eminent men of letters--novelist, poet, essayist, editor, scientist, mathematician, and, more to the point, pataphysician. And only a pataphysician nurtured lovingly on surrealist excess could have come up with The Blue Flowers, Queneau's 1964 novel, now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook. To a pataphysician all things are equal, there is no improvement or progress in the human condition, and a message is an invention of the benighted reader, certainly not the author or his perplexing creations--the sweet, fennel-drinking Cidrolin and the rampaging Duke d'Auge. History is mostly what the duke rampages through--700 years of it at 175-year clips. He refuses to crusade, clobbers his king with the in toy of 1439--the cannon--dabbles in alchemy, and decides that those musty caves down at Altamira need a bit of sprucing up. Meanwhile, Cidrolin in the 1960s lolls on his barge moored along the Seine, sips essence of fennel, and ineffectually tries to catch the graffitist who nightly defiles his fence. But mostly he naps. Is it just a coincidence that the duke appears only when Cidrolin is dozing? And vice versa? In the tradition of Villon and C line, Queneau attempted to bring the language of the French streets into common literary usage, and his mad word-plays, bad puns, bawdy jokes, and anachronistic wackiness have been kept amazingly and glitteringly intact by the incomparable translator Barbara Wright.

The Translator: Madeleine Velguth is an assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her Ph.D. in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to her monograph, The Representation of Women in the Autobiographical Novels of Raymond Queneau (Peter Lang, 1990), she has published articles on Queneau, Drieu la Rochelle, Derrida, Sarraute and Stendhal.

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9782070370009
ISBN 10	2070370003
Titre	Les fleurs bleues
Auteur	Raymond Queneau
État	Non disponible
Type de reliure	Paperback
Éditeur	Editions Flammarion
Année de publication	1983-06-01
Nombre de pages	280
Note de couverture	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible