'The Blue Flowers' is the most lovable of all Raymond Queneau's novels, one of those rare books you never want to end (for me, the only others I can think of are 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Dance to the music of time'). It relates two paralell narratives (or rather - and Queneau is the great mathematical novelist! - base and perpendicular narratives): the historical narrative of the endearingly aggressive Duc d'Auge, nay-sayer to royal authority and public opinion, friend of Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade, and debunker of religion to the extent of daubing on caves in the Perigord region to 'prove' the existence of humanity before Adam; his three daughters, including the defective, bleating Phelise, and their small-minded spouses; his squire Mouscaillot and their talking horses, philosophical Demosthenes and taciturn Stef; and his clerical foils, the abbes Biroton and Riphinte. We meet the Duke at 175 year historical intervals - refusing to rejoin the barbarous crusades in 1264, and forced to slaughter disapproving bourgeoisie; investing in new weaponry, most notably the cannon, in defence of his castle in 1439; dabbling in alchemy in 1614; fleeing the French Revolution in 1789. Throughout he hunts, visits the capital, marries woodcutters' young daughters, feasts ferociously, and debates with his clergy.
From the terrifying active Duke, the contemporary story focuses on passive Cidrolin, once wrongly convicted for a crime for which he is still persecuted by an unknown graffiti artist who daubs obscene accusations on his fence every night. Now living on a barge, drinking endless glasses of essence of fennel, he doesn't do much, giving directions to tourists, staring at construction sites or the nearby camping site. Any trip out of the ordinary invariably finds him back where he started; conversations are banal and repetitive. Like the Duke, he has three daughters and sons-in-law, a dead wife and the first name Joachim. He spends most of his time taking siestas, dreaming of the Duke. When the Duke sleeps, usually replete from an enormous meal, he dreams of Cidrolin. Queneau says his book's starting point was the old Chinese saying about a philosopher - When he went to sleep, he dreamt of a butterfly; when he woke up, he wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming of a philosopher.
'Flowers' is, according to the experts, Queneau's most dense and philosophical novel, an intimidating mixture of Chinese philosophy, 'Finnegan's Wake', Plato, Hegel etc. It certainly deals with Big Themes, such as History, Time, Cosmology, Art, the Importance and Interpretation of Dreams. But for the less intellectually alert amongst us (including me), 'Flowers' offers sundry, more accessible pleasures. The comic set-pieces, which can arise from slapstick; bathos and deflated rhetoric; the deadpan recording of absurd conversations, and the absurd convolutions of deadpan conversations. the characters, from whom biography and psychology is deliberately and crucially elided, nevertheless end up being so completely endearing you don't want to leave them. The eulogy to dreams and their subversive power over official history. The detective story element - what crime was Cidrolin accused of? Who is his persector? Why is the watchman of the camp spying on him? Who sabotaged the new flats? Mostly, 'Flowers' is a joy for its language: the historical settings and wide social range of characters allowing for an Augian feast of archaic and obsolete words, jaw-breaking technical terms, slang, puns, neologisms, for all of which Barbara Wright finds delightful and rich equivalents in the wealth of English life and literature. So inventive, audacious and important is her translating, she should really be credited as the book's co-author.

Queneau is a master, as is his translator Barbara Wright. I don't think you will find a translation that communicates more of the book's essence than this one. Every sentence is a play on words and meaning...Wright manages to take Queneau's French "jokes" and make them equally artistic English ones. This book is a delight in its entirety, perfectly deliberate and crafted, yet whimsical, personal, rambling, historical, and more all at once. It is as forward-thinking as Joyce's Ulysses, and in my opinion as important a primer for the ultimate literature.

There is a phrase in the original french edition of this book which explains everything: "REVER ET REVELER C'EST A PEU PRES LE MEME MOT". Italo Calvino translated in italian with a fantastic "STAI ATTENTO CON LE STORIE INVENTATE, RIVELANO COSA C'E' SOTTO. TAL QUALE COME I SOGNI" Keep attention with your dreams, they will disclose your intentions. Read this book and sleep with Cidrolin dreaming about the life of the Duc d'Auge in the past or, if you prefer, live with the Duc d'Auge and dream about Cidrolin's life in the present. Just a surprise: one day, in Paris, they will meet themselves...

Sad and funny and beautiful, Queneau watches the world and portrays the smallest of things in the most unique way. Celebrating the simpleton, Queneau looks back at his student years. His head is stuck in books. He meets few friends. Outside, the world swindles and connives and lies and quips. Outsiders take note, this book settles long after the last page is turned. A special, special book. A great introduction to the world of Queneau.

This novel (Queneau's second after "Le Chiendent" translated as 'the Bark Tree' by Barbara Wright) is a charming, witty novel about the travails of several French students preparing for their "bacheau" admirably cointerpointed with a secondary story of a petty swindler and a tertiary story of a waiter who comfabulates a fantastic betting schema based on the movements of the lunary planets and their shifts and motion. The deft translation gives the full flavor of the novel, and Queneau's writing is superbly sunny and wonderful. This is a must read for all those interested in the development of the French novel c. 1930-s to 1940-s. It's quite funny!

Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Raymond Queneau was a polyglot, and a mathematician with a love of patterns, forms and games. He wrote a study of dog language in Carroll's 'Sylvie and Bruno', and 'Zazie' is his update of Alice to the Parisian Wonderland of the late 1950s, although it is not clear whether Zazie is an anti-Alice, bringing chaos to a normal society, or whether she is a precocious, sensible, curious (if foul-mouthed) child faced with a blinkingly unstable universe: Zazie is notably passive in the book's final third, when the linguistic, philosophical, temporal, narrative, spatial and sexual dissolutions collapse into a frenzy of barmy physical violence.

the book as a whole sees Rabelais and Diderot rewriting the Arabian Nights. Each chapter plays like a Ionesco drama, a sustained, rhythmic dialogue where the disparity between bizarre event and the disintegrating attempts of language to express it, creates a gap where logic contracts, explodes and comes back together in an hilarious anti-logic. Not only are the borders of dream and reality, plausibility and fantasy, role play and identity broken down, but Queneau's narrative procedures - at once Joycean in its plenitude, and startling in its gaping ellipses - further confuse the reader.

'Zazie' is Queneau's most 'plausible' novel, in that much of its fun lies in its Parisian locales, and its comedy at the expense of romantic cliches about the city; but it is also a true Surrealist novel, both in breaking down the normality of the real, and in asserting that the only way you can get what you want is to dream.

Raymond Queneau has written a strange but tantalizing little novel about an adolescent named Zazie... she has a New York accent, and the mouth of a Henry Miller. Her misadventures in Paris, prove challenging to those around her,and amusing to the reader. It's am amusing collage of seemimgly misplaced dialogue and eccentric characters, yet is easy to read and laugh with.

(Note: Queneau is, I think, an underappreciated genius. You can find out more about him by looking up the book "The OULIPO COMPENDIUM" here at Amazon, which contains his extraordinary "One-hundred-trillion sonnets." "Oulipans: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" -- Raymond Queneau).

Zazie is less of a labyrinth and more of a amusement park, a good introduction to this imaginative writer. Probably not for those easily offended (nor is "Zazie" herself), but a little treasure worth looking for.

Queneau used an incredibly rigid, and for its time, innovative structure for the creation of this marvellous book. Each chapter is divided in 13 parts, and every entry and exit of a character is perfectly measured. The beauty is, that reading the book, one isn't even aware of the structure. The story, set in 1920's Paris, recounts the intwining lives of a musician, a beggar, a down at heel mid-wife, and an "ordinary man", who during the passage of the book, gradually devellops a certain cosistancy

This is the first novel I have read by queneau and I certainly plan on reading more by him. "The flight of Icarus" is a hysterical novel in the form of a play, consciously parodying pirandello. It follows a young man, Icarus, the main character of a novelists new book, who escapes its pages and enters late 19th century paris. It is an amusing easy read, full of intentionally awful puns. I recommend it :).

Queneau offers a caleidoscope of satirical views about Paris and the people there, and he populates his novel with truly bizarre guys. Zazie is a perhaps twelve-year old girl that comes to Paris with her mother for some days; the mother visits her lover, and Zazie visits her uncle Gabriel. Gabriel works as a dancer (with a balley costume) in a gays' night-club without being homosexual himself. Some of his friends (a shoemaker, a pub owner, a parakeet, a taxi driver, Gabriel's wife, an almost-rapist) make the scene complete.

Queneau does not forget to fill the book with swearwords and other vulgarities that are common in Paris, and he leaves no opportunity out to make everyone look ridiculous - a bus full of tourists, the "gendarmerie", the Parisian car drivers...

I laughed a lot.

Raymond Queneau's comic cult novel is an unjustly neglected classic that was once distributed by the same French publishing house that handled Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Miller's Tropic Of Cancer when no one else would dare. Zazie is a sweet, sassy, cynical little girl with the mouth of a truck driver. She arrives in Paris to visit her uncle (a female impersonator), but what she really wants is to ride the Metro. Alas, the Metro workers are on strike, so our little heroine goes off on her own in search of adventure, driving her poor uncle nuts in the process. This wonderful book manages to be funny and heartwarming while maintaining a raunchy, satirical edge. A perfect book for a rainy day! Definitely not for children or the easily offended, but great entertainment for young-at-heart adults. Be sure to see Louis Malle's great 1960 movie version, which he directs with the pace and energy of a Roadrunner cartoon!

You see a portrait of your beloved inner-Zazie. Isnt't she just adorable

As noted by other reviewers, this reading of Hegel is a post-Nietzsche, post-Marx, post-Heidegger one (meaning it incorporates or synthesizes these post-Hegel, though influenced-by-Hegel, strains of thought). It is therefore scorned by some Hegel 'purists' like Mr. Trejo below. However, having read quite a few commentaries on and interpretations of the Phenomenology I can say that this one is the most well-written, in the sense that it illuminates some very difficult Hegelian concepts (like "Spirit" or Geist itself) in a searingly direct manner. I have also never read another writer so convincing in their argument as to Hegel's essential rightness in his description of the Concept which brings closure to the riddle of Western metaphysics.

I would agree with the 'purists' in not taking this book as the 'definitive' interpretation of Hegel - it can't excuse not reading Hegel in the original, or other commentaries - but I would call it essential within the spectrum of Hegelian thought.

Interestingly, this book shows Hegel, though famously critical of Kant, to be essentially the extender of the Kantian philosophy to it's logical conclusion which is the completion of the Concept of Experience, identified as Time itself (ZeitGeist). That is, Human Time, initiated by Human Desire, as the Absolute Subject constructing itself rationally via reflection on it's Object-negating activity or creativity, not in the classical notion of a rational Time as existing somehow outside or independently of a Subject).

Kojeve's reading however, though convincing in it's demonstration of anthropologically necessary Historical development toward Hegelian 'harmony' between Subject and Object, leaves out Hegel's attempt at the absolute identity of the Object itself. This can be read in two ways that Kojeve touches on. First, in the truer-to-Hegel sense that the Object is necessarily different from the Subject to ensure the ability of the Subject to realize itself as Self, as free Subject of Object-negating, creative, activity. Another way to read this is as simply Kojeve's dismissal of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and it's more cosmic attempt at spiritualizing the notion of matter. Either way, as many Hegel commentator's have noted, one is left, though certainly further enlightened as to the nature of subjectivity, with a sense that there is still something 'out there' and unknown, ala Kant's 'thing-in-itself'. This can be understood as the Heidegger-influenced side of Kojeve's reading.

My own conclusion at the moment is that both Hegel and the existentialist school following him ala Heidegger and Kojeve can be understood as essentially philosophers of subjectivity in the Western tradition who have rationally illuminated, but also exhausted the questioning of the Self about it's nature. As our great contemporary philosopher in the Continental tradtion Jurgen Habermas has noted, it's high time to move beyond the philosophy of monological subjectivity. For fresh thinking in this area and where to pick up the pieces after Hegel, Heidegger, Kojeve, etc. (rather than taking the nihilistic road of 'post-modernism') I highly recommend Habermas's _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Habermas as successor to this line of thought is convincingly stated in the opening chapter "Modernity's Consciousness of Time and It's Need For Self-Reassurance" and in his call for moving on to a paradigm of "Intersubjectivity" and Reason understood anew as Communicative Action.

As noted by other reviewers, this reading of Hegel is a post-Nietzsche, post-Marx, post-Heidegger one (meaning it incorporates or synthesizes these post-Hegel, though influenced-by-Hegel, strains of thought). It is therefore scorned by some Hegel 'purists' like Mr. Trejo below. However, having read quite a few commentaries on and interpretations of the Phenomenology I can say that this one is the most well-written, in the sense that it illuminates some very difficult Hegelian concepts (like "Spirit" itself) in a searingly direct manner. I have also never read another writer so convincing in their argument as to Hegel's essential rightness in his description of the Concept which brings closure to the riddle of Western metaphysics.

I would agree with the 'purists' in not taking this book as the 'definitive' interpretation of Hegel - it can't excuse not reading Hegel in the original, or other commentaries - but I would call it essential within the spectrum of Hegelian thought.

Interestingly, this book shows Hegel, though famously critical of Kant, to be essentially the extender of the Kantian philosophy to it's logical conclusion which is the completion of the Concept of Experience, identified as Time itself (ZeitGeist). That is, Human Time, initiated by the emergence of specifically Human Desires (i.e.; for recognition), as the Absolute Subject which constructs itself rationally via reflection on it's Object-negating or given-negating activity or creativity, not in the classical notion of a rational Time as existing somehow outside or independently of a Subject).

Kojeve's reading however, though convincing in it's demonstration of anthropologically necessary Historical development toward Hegelian 'harmony' between the Subject and it's Object, leaves out Hegel's attempt at the absolute identity of the Object itself. This can be read in two ways that Kojeve touches on. First, in the truer-to-Hegel sense that the Object is necessarily different from the Subject to ensure the ability of the Subject to realize itself as Self, as free Subject of Object-negating, creative, activity. Another way to read this is as simply Kojeve's dismissal of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and it's more cosmic attempt at spiritualizing the notion of matter. Either way, as many Hegel commentator's have noted, one is left, though undoubtedly further enlightened regarding the nature of subjectivity, with a sense that there is still something 'out there' and unknown, ala Kant's 'thing-in-itself'. This can be understood as the Heidegger-influenced side of Kojeve's reading.

My own conclusion at the moment is that both Hegel and the existentialist school following him ala Heidegger and Kojeve can be understood as essentially philosophers of subjectivity in the Western tradition who have rationally illuminated, but also thoroughly exhausted the questioning of the Self about it's nature. As our great contemporary philosopher in the Continental tradtion Jurgen Habermas has noted, it's high time to move beyond the philosophy of monological subjectivity. For fresh thinking in this area and where to pick up the pieces after Hegel, Heidegger, Kojeve, etc. (rather than taking the nihilistic road of 'post-modernism') I highly recommend Habermas's _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Habermas as successor to this line of thought is convincingly stated in the opening chapter "Modernity's Consciousness of Time and It's Need For Self-Reassurance" and in his call for moving on to a paradigm of "Intersubjectivity" and Reason understood anew as Communicative Action.

As noted by other reviewers, this reading of Hegel is a post-Nietzsche, post-Marx, post-Heidegger one (meaning it incorporates or synthesizes these post-Hegel, though influenced-by-Hegel, strains of thought). It is therefore scorned by some Hegel 'purists' like Mr. Trejo below. However, having read quite a few commentaries on and interpretations of the Phenomenology I can say that this one is the most well-written, in the sense that it illuminates some very difficult Hegelian concepts (like "Spirit" itself) in a searingly direct manner. I have also never read another writer so convincing in their argument as to Hegel's essential rightness in his description of the Concept which brings closure to the riddle of Western metaphysics.

I would agree with the 'purists' in not taking this book as the 'definitive' interpretation of Hegel - it can't excuse not reading Hegel in the original, or other commentaries - but I would call it essential within the spectrum of Hegelian thought.

Interestingly, this book shows Hegel, though famously critical of Kant, to be essentially the extender of the Kantian philosophy to it's logical conclusion which is the completion of the Concept of Experience, identified as Time itself (ZeitGeist). That is, Human Time as the Absolute Subject constructing itself rationally via reflection on it's Object-negating activity (creativity in transforming the given or present), not in the classical notion of a rational Time as existing somehow outside or independentaly of a Subject.

Kojeve's reading however, though convincing in it's demonstration of anthropologically necessary development toward Hegelian 'harmony' between Subject and Object, leaves out Hegel's attempt at the absolute identity of the Object itself. This can be read in two ways that Kojeve touches on. First, in the truer-to-Hegel sense that the Object is necessarily different from the Subject to ensure the ability of the Subject to realize itself as Self, as free Subject of Object-negating, creative, activity. Another way to read this is as simply Kojeve's dismissal of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and it's more cosmic attempt at spiritualizing the notion of matter. Either way, as many Hegel commentator's have noted, one is left, though certainly further enlightened as to the nature of subjectivity, with a sense that there is still something 'out there' and unknown, ala Kant's 'thing-in-itself'. This can be understood as the Heidegger-influenced side of Kojeve's reading.

My own conclusion at the moment is that both Hegel and the existentialist school following him ala Heidegger and Kojeve can be understood as essentially philosophers of subjectivity in the Western tradition who have exhausted the questioning of the Self about it's nature. As our great contemporary philosopher in the Continental tradtion Jurgen Habermas has noted, it's high time to move beyond the philosophy of the monological subject. For fresh thinking in this area and where to pick up the pieces after Hegel, Heidegger, Kojeve, etc. (rather than taking the nihilistic road of 'post-modernism') I highly recommend Habermas's _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Habermas as successor to this line of thought is convincingly stated in the opening chapter "Modernity's Consciousness of Time and It's Need For Self-Reassurance" and in his call for moving on to a paradigm of "Intersubjectivity" and Reason understood anew as Communicative Action.

Like most Raymond Queneau novels, 'The Sunday of Life' is a seemingly inconsequential novel that suddenly opens up onto a philosophical vortex.

Valentin Bru is a retiring private soldier in Bordeaux, a veteran of colonial warfare singled out for marriage by a middle-aged merceress whom he has never met. Bru's sole desire is to be a street sweeper, but soon inherits a frame-selling shop in Paris. An earlier visit to the city on a honeymoon he had to take on his own because of his wife's concern for business, saw him engaged in farcical adventures ending up coincidentally at the funeral of his mother-in-law's younger lover. Now in his shop, he becomes a kind of confessional for the local traders, passing on the information to his wife who, unknown to him, has become a clairvoyant.

So far, so funny. The novel proceeds with Queneau's usual gorgeous style, that decaptively loose mix of vernacular and circumlocution that creates comedy by over-verbalising the banal, or pitting his hero's innocence and good faith against the cynical, or customs he simply doesn't understand.

Soon, however, time intrudes, as Valentin acts on a desire to 'trap' time, to follow the long hand of a clock without losing himself in reveries or distractions. The title derives from Hegel, whose spirit haunts the book, and refers, apparently, to a point where history ends and everyday is like Sunday, a timeless realm of pure consciousness. Or something. I don't know anything about Hegel, you'd have to look it up. Certainly, there are at least two strands of time in the novel, the world of the late 30s, Nazism, the impending Fall of France, and the seemingly detached present tense Valentin seems to float through. this is reinforced by a plot with fortune tellers and a hero who predicts a coming war in a 1952 novel that knows he's right.

Philosophers will probably enjoy all this - the rest of us can relish the simpler pleasures: linguistic play; deadpan funny characters; deadpan silly, almost irrelevant comic situations; deadpan dialogue; a sunny love of Paris.

This is one of my favourite Queneau novels. Actually it's one of my favourite novels! In one slim volume Queneau achieves a poignancy and oblique truthfulness that is very rarely found in 'modernist' literature. Much is said of Queneau's technique - the neologisms, anachronisms, puns, mathematics - but to focus on these surface aspects is, in my opinion, partly missing the point. Queneau puts all of himself into his works and these technical aspects reflect his deep love of language and recognition of the fact that a novel is essentially an 'artificial' creation. Why shouldn't the writer do as he pleases? But there is much more to the man Queneau. Aside from his linguistic play, his works are always deeply humane. It is enlightening to read Queneau's list of 100 favourite novels. Aswell as Jacques the Fatalist you will find Hemingway, Faulkner and Dickens. Queneau, like Calvino, considers himself a reader first, writer second. Like Calvino he considers reading itself an art form. Certainly he calls upon us to exercise our 'artistic' talents but also he requires us to see each of his novels as an 'artifact', as simply 'some writing'. A good novel can be like a window: giving us a 'view' of some created world, or focussing our attention on the 'pane of glass' itself; Queneau's novels do both. We are voyeurs of the bumbling of his characters but we can also see the frame, never forgetting that this is a novel that we're reading. And so Valentin Bru, like all his most endearing characters, is a person and an archetype. He embodies the deepest concerns of the novel (he is a naif, gifted with the "good humour" that means he "cannot be fundamentally bad or base", encapsulating the quote by Hegel with which the novel begins) and yet we can empathise with him as a typically flawed specimen of humanity, trying to pass his time on Earth as painlessly as possible. Like Pierrot (Pierrot mon ami), like Cidrolin (The Blue Flowers), like Alfred (The Last Days). It is my belief that all these novels, all these characters, ask the same question: why do we do what it is we do? Queneau always seems to answer, never unequivocally ofcourse: because we are human. Valentin Bru does what he does because it doesn't matter what he does, he could do something else, or not. Queneau's characters and novels have no bounds, no limitations. They suggest and accept all possibilities. This is what makes his work, and The Sunday of Life especially, so profoundly and poignantly humane.

Oh my god! Zazie's out of stock and the Bark Tree too. A shame, although this is pretty good nonetheless, got me into Queneau, anyway. Pretty damn funny with a sardonic aftertaste. Like the rest of his stuff. You have to see the movies of this and Zazie, though, (especially Zazie). Malle achieves on film is equivalent to Queneau's achievement on the page. Before I read this my concentration was very low in every respect. Somehow this book helped my concentration level... if books can do that. Maybe it was something else, but it's still a good book as are the other two. The Bark Tree's pretty different to this one, darker, more like Robbe-Grillet if you get into that stuff. Have fun.

The basic idea is charming, but as I suspected beforehand, it doesn't translate very well into a reading experience. To put it simply, Queneau was wrong when he assumed 99 versions to be "the classic ideal" or something like that. Most of these passages are unreadable, at least all the grammatical exercises.

Having said that, I must admit two things. First, since I don't know French, I had to read a Finnish translation. It's quite clear to me that some of the details must disappear in translation, especially as the Finnish language is not even related to French. (On the other hand, some passages generated specially for the Finnish edition were quite hilarious.)

A more important point is that Queneau can definitely demonstrate the infinite variations in language and storytelling. How many viewpoints can you take on a simple story! The varying description of details was pretty amusing.

In the end, this book is just a joke, even though a clever one. I don't think it has much to do with fictional prose.

I have already written a review of this book. Nevertheless, I would like to come back to the subject in order to make my opinion clearer. As George Steiner often said (see for instance "Errata," 1997): "each human language is different from the others; this is the charm of languages." And this is also why I find it hard to believe to someone who claims that Barbara Wright has EXACTLY rendered Queneau's wit into English. I still have not read Wright's translation. Yet I know that humour has many cultural connotations, which are difficult to render in another language. Luckily, both the idea and the structure of "Exercises in style" relieve translators of the need of "staying true" to the original version. I mean that when you translate "Exercises in style" there is some room for your invention. A translator may also enjoy adding new variations on the main theme. The most brilliant example of variations I know is that by the Italian scholar Umberto Eco; but I am sure that other excellent examples are possible. In conclusion, the more you can learn new languages, the more you can read (and translate!) "Exercises in style" in new versions; and the more you can read (and translate) "Exercises in style" in new versions, the more you can enjoy yourself.

Queneau was, among many other things, a brilliant gamester. In this book he takes the most banal of stories and tells it 99 times in 99 different styles. It is a weird book, whose charm grows as you continue. Once you get to the 5th or 6th version of this inane tale, you begin to laugh and gasp and don't stop until the end. Like all good jokes, it is more than a joke. If you delight in language, read this book. If you do not delight in launguage, this book will teach you to. I have read the original French version, and Barbara Wright has stayed true to it in this wonderful translation. Don't miss this gem!

Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

This book is a riot! I highly recommend it. All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, a group of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience.