'Pierrot mon ami' was written around the same time as Celine's 'Guignol's Band', and, like that controversial classic, features a passive innocent on the margins of society, with carnies, circus acts, petty ex-criminals, mad artists - at one point, like Ferdinand, Pierrot becomes an assistant to a fake fakir.

'Pierrot' has slightly more reference to the Occupation than Queneau's other novels in the period - a fire razing a giant amusement arcade is said to have been started by one of the attractions, burning chairoplanes; an uproarious journey with a boar and a chimp is arguably a figure for anti-Semitism; a bottle of Vichy water is pronounced disgusting.

Another point of reference might be Sartre's famous short story 'The Wall'. Pierrot's imprisonment may be more metaphorical than actual - he is condemned to walk the same streets every day; on the one occasion he leaves, the rest of the book's cast go with him, while the strangers he meet used to work in the area - but it provokes the same Nietzchean laughter.

I point this out to show how much 'Pierrot' is of its time - Queneau is often dismissed for refusing to 'engage'. In any case, 'Pierrot' is a supremely anti-Nazi book, with its shifting perspectives, its formal games, its narrative and semantic gaps, its instability of character, refusing the reader the reassurance of fixity or authority.

But if 'Pierrot' is of its time, it's also ahead of it. Together with Nabokov's 'The Real life of Sebastian Knight' and Borges' Ficciones, Queneau was at this moment pioneering anti-detective fiction, that genre later populated by Pynchon, Calvino, Eco, Sciascia et al, where the conventional rules of the detective story are invoked (a mystery, investigation), but its ideological function is displaced (resolution, restoration of social order).

'Pierrot' is full of mysteries - who was the woman Jojo Mouilliminche died for? Who was the Paldovian prince whose tomb Mouzzenergues faithfully curates? Who burned the Uni-Park where philosophers pay and brawl to see brief glimpses of female flesh, the hero is sporadically employed, and where he meets the boss's daughter who will sleep with everyone but him (well, he is a pierrot)? Are these things connected? There is a proliferation of clues, coincidences and patterns, but, perhaps because of the Occupation, there is less faith in the restorative powers of the genre.

Instead of fixing things in their proper place, 'Pierrot' is a book that celebrates play - every character is in some way connected to performance, and their every appearance is like a 'bit' or 'act' on the novel's stage.

Pierrot turns away from CHOICE to follow coincidence, chance meetings, crossed paths, to follow, dream-like, the destiny that will take him accross France with a tame monkey and a wild boar... A book dedicated to the peace of accepting the direction life sets us, instead of stiding, giant steps, to determine a false life for ourselves.

Anything by Queneau attracts attention, but this was dissappointing, and hard work to get to the end. The plot, unusually, meanders or is obscure - a thin technique to print the mad scientists' manuscripts that clog up the text.

Raymond Queneau's works are generally circumscribed in scope, with a small cast of characters and restricted, usually Parisian settings. Their vastness comes from a philosophical play with time, and a casual use of recondite allusion. 'Children of Clay', however, is quite literally encyclopaedic. In the early 1930s, Queneau compiled an anthology of 19th century literary lunatics (cranks, conspiracy theorists, alternative semioticians, cosmologists etc.), which failed to find a publisher. This novel features a provincial, aristocratic headmaster who researches and compiles such an encyclopaedia, huge, dizzying chunks of which prop up the novel, hatstand versions of the universe's beginning jostling with paranoid accounts of what really happened in French history.

'Children of Clay' is many other things too. It is a huge historical novel, set in the France of the late 1920s and early 30s, with the Stock Market Crash, the decline of the aristocracy and the giant industrialists, working class unrest, anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism. The large dramatis personae include the Hachamoth family, the Jewish Baron and his extreme Catholic wife, her foppish younger brother, her beautiful daughters and religious zealot son; Clemence, their disfigured maid; the Gramignis, refugees from Fascist Italy; Robert Bossu, a barowner's son, convinced of his impending greatness in the new France; Chambernac himself, an inept sexual transgressor, who, in a reverse of the Faust story, forces a devil to sign a contract to help him complete his encyclopaedia.

Mirroring his madmen's cosmologies, all these characters ultimately descend from one man, Claye, only glimpsed in one paragraph, committing suicide from a plane. The novel is full of parodic Biblical allusions and restagings (the children of Claye are also the children of clay, i.e. all Mankind), as characters struggle to live in a violent, evil world that God has seemingly abdicated. The novel ranges in space from Italy to the English Channel, by way of the Riviera and Paris, and in time from the French Revolution to the rise of European fascism; or, more precisely, from the creation of the world to, perhaps, its imminent demise.

'Children' is one of those huge, counter-encyclopaedias, like Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy', Swift's 'Tale of the Tub', Melville's 'Moby Dick' or Benjamin's 'Arcades', works that gather together masses of alternative knowledge, marginal, ephemeral, 'useless', trivial, rubbish, countering the encyclopaedic ambition to totalise and classify and explain life. by focusing on what seems unimportant, even mad, these works are perversely never complete, spiralling endlessly, creating a counter-knowledge that can make life, the world, the universe, seem vertiginously new and inexhaustible.

There is so much going on in 'Children', it might be overpowering if it wasn't written in crisp, sprightly, ironic, elliptical comic prose. The novel is contemporary with Marcel Carne's poetic realist films that seemed to prevision the Fall of France, and it shares their profound pessimism, but instead of suffocating in dead ends, Queneau offers us a dazzling collage of possibilities, different ways of looking at the world, all bonkers, but as we try to find a way out of the mess produced by prevailing mindsets, than maybe we could do with a little madness.

While this volume is a difficult read, it is at once tragic yet humourous; thought-provoking yet full of madness; fantasic yet realistic. Anyone who enjoys a though provoking book, touching on almost all aspects of life will enjoy this book.

This book's French title actually translates as 'Far From Reuil' (a suburb of Paris), but both are appropriate. 'Skin of Dreams' relates the adventures of Jacques L'Aumone, schoolboy; illegitimate son of a nobleman poet; cineaste; chemical engineer; theatre director; extra; unrequited lover; vagrant; saint; documentary filmmaker; tropical adventurer; world-famous film-star.

The novel sets up a division between the 'real' world of 1920s Reuil and the cinema-generated dreams of the young Jacques, who wishes himself a cowboy, composer etc. Distinctions between the two soon vanish, with fantasy becoming reality, or reality merely seeming fantastic (the plot has the circularity, recurrence and metamorphosis of characters, situations and motifs, the speedy rush of incident of a dream, but refuses to declare itself as such).

This goes beyond the familiar blurring of reality and fantasy, and is part of the Surrealist project of unearthing the fluid, transformmative, fetishistic and strange inherent in the monolithc everyday, with its repressions of reality, family, gender, etc.

This was a pertinent desire in the Occupation during which the novel was written: the novel is also a very funny parody of the existentialism that was emerging as the era's credo (one of the characters suffers from a 'posh' form of asthma called 'ontalgia').

Like Godard's universe in a coffee cup, the novel's metaphysical reach encompasses lice and the stars. For all its linguistic and philosophical enquiry, however, it should not be forgotten that Queneau has, in miniature, a Proustian facility with the extended set-piece - Jacques becoming the cowboy he imitates on screen; Jacques trying to tantalise an elderly Humbert into selling a valuable medicine; Jacques' abandoned wife relating her history - and a cast of characters that, again like Proust, are as vivid and human as they are protean and elusive.

These pieces are followed by Notes - a section I rarely like in literature but here it is appropriate, necessary and well done. These pieces often require knowledge of the world play in French or the ability to catch allusions that are unlikely to be known by an English-language reader. A sampling of the texts included:

"Dino" is the story of an invisible dog accompanying its master on long walks in Portugal. The dog reappears in "At the Forest's Edge" - a story of a nearly deserted hotel with no cook and a sexually agressive daughter.

"In Passing", a personal favorite among these texts, tells the story of a couple, a beggar and a passerby twice - changing the gender of the roles between the two tellings.

"The Cafe de La France" is a bleak view of Le Havre as decimated by the war - a very effective piece mulling over writing and childhood in the context of the ruined city.

"The Trojan Horse" occurs in a bar where a horse from Troyes insists on purchasing drinks for a couple drinking only water and planning to "hit up" an aunt for financial assistance.

"Green With Fright" combines wordplay and dream in the story of a man unable to leave the bathroom because of his fear of the nothingness lurking in the hallway.

"Conversations in Greater Paris" is "found poetry" i.e. an assemblage of bits and pieces of conversations captured in the author's notebooks.

"Texticles" is a collection of short pieces based in some sense on word play, rhetoric, semantics - they are an excellent example of playing with words as a media rather than as a tool of communication.

"A Story of Your Own" is an early example of a tree-structure story in which after each piece of the tale, you are offered options as to what should come next.

"Some Brief Remarks Relative to the Aerodynamic Properties of Addition" is a piece that considers the movement of numbers and arithemetic symbols due to the force of the wind ... an absolute delight.

"Dream Accounts Aplenty" is a series of short dream accounts told as an example of the shortcomings of dreams as the "stuff" of writing.

The other pieces are as diverse as the ones I have mentioned. Don't read this as a relaxing narrative - it isn't; do read this as an exploration of the use of language and narrative.

Irish revolutionnaries in Dublin. They try to invest the city. We follow a group of them in a bank. And a young woman trapped in the "lavatories" (in english in the text) fiancée of an english captain... A story of innocent people who tempted to enter the history. Written in a fresh and joyful language.

For more information this book is a part of another which title is "the private diary of Sally Mara" which is really worthwhile to read.

Roland Travy states that he was not born until his twenty-first year. It is while in the French army that year that he sees an Arab man gazing at the land and sky. Travy likens him to a poet or a philsopher and it is this image that begins to awaken his true inner being. Arriving back in Paris he falls in with Communist bohemian artists, political anarchists, pimps, and thugs. This is also where he meets Odile. In the end he accepts who he really is.

Queneau does a brillant job of showing the absurdity and humor in everything that happens in Odile. From the beginning there's a laugh when Roland states that his fellow soldiers "are really good guys and all capable no doubt of making really good butchers". The bohemians are seen as ineffectual idiots more interested in preaching to their own circle of disciples than improving the common people. They're the same posers you see nowadays in cafes preaching to each other about the sad state of humanity but having no effect upon their fate. Roland sees all this but goes along with the different movements, at least superficially. At one point he visits a seance where the spirit of Lenin is summoned and as he walks out he comments how pathetic the spectacle was. Even Roland is guilty, spending 8-12 hours a day in his apartment working with mathematical problems. He has spent years in the belief that he is a latter day Isacc Newton or an Einstein who will discover the true nature of reality through mathematics and physics. He's also too proud to admit he's in love with Odile. It wouldn't be in keeping with his image if anyone knew he was in love. At the end of the book he has a vision of what he truly is and he snaps out of the childish games of his adulthood.

This novel is funny, and I mean that in the humorous sense. The characters are a little weak except for Roland but that's to be expected in an autobiographical work. The beginning and the end of the novel pack more punch than the middle. The crisis of identity is equal to The Stranger in some passages but here we have a happy ending. A realization of meaning. Or IS it a happy ending? Roland decides to live a "normal" life and dismisses any rebellion against society as a childish act of defiance and a losing battle. You have to be assimilated sooner or later.

This 1937 novella is an autobiographical work, transposing, through the narrator-hero Roland Travy, Queneau's disjointed life in 1920s Paris - his rejection of his bourgeois background; his living in Paris; his military service; his struggles with his art.

Travy, returned from two years military service in a mostly clerical position, subsists in Paris on an allowance from a gay, ex-colonial uncle, conducting obscure mathematical research, lost in a fug of solipsism, passivity and a lack of self-esteem. He drifts in with a group of petty criminals, where he meets another bourgeois abscondee, Odile, and, with equal passivity, gets involved with the Infrapsychics, an eccentric group of intellectuals who hope to provoke revolution through liberating the unconscious and the irrational.

For such a small book, 'Odile' is many things: a damning account of French colonialism in North Africa - the opening scenes depicting the crushing of a local rebellion in Morocco are frightening precisely because of their un-Tolstoyan vagueness; a satire/critique/fond evocation of political and cultural life in 1920s Paris, all the groups, -isms, infighting, experiments, flirting with Communism - in particular the Surrealists, to whom Queneau was briefly affiliated (he married Andre Breton's sister), relentlessly lampooning their arbitrary games and theories, while admitting the creative debt he owes them; a love story, postponed by a hero who 'despises' bourgeois notions like 'love' and 'marriage'; and the bildungsroman of an artist who goes along with whatever comes his way, be it the army, the Infrapsychics, criminals, Communists etc., always unhappy, but never taking the active step thta might transform his, or reconcile him to, life.

Fans of Queneau's more linguistically playful works like 'Zazie' and 'Exercises of Style' might find 'Odile' disappointing. As a love story, the figure of Odile is too idealised and symbolic to be affecting; the satire on Surrealism and its cultural milieu is too laboured and obvious to be laugh-out-loud (although this might be a problem with the flat translation: Queneau needs someone as recklessly inventive as Barbara Wright to survive in English) - there is fun to be had in recognising the fictionalised Breton, Aragon, Eluard etc., and there is an Alice-like court hearing, in which the magistrate starts interrogating Travy about Fermat's last theorem and the 'excluded middle'; the narrative of maturity is blunted by the narrator's rather unsympathetic personality, even if his aesthetics of mathematics is frequently, to this ignoramous, enrapturing, and his struggle to record his memories, imperfectly exploring the landscape of his mind with as many black holes as open spaces, is very poignant.

'Odile' has been called 'gentle', but what is most immediately apparent is the sadness and emptiness behind the logorrheic comedy. Where 'Odile' succeeds is formally and philosophically. It lacks the set-pieces of 'Zazie', but there is the same dizzying, elliptical style, what Gilbert Adair calls Queneau's 'jump cuts', the same telescoping and contracting of narrative time and space, that can be disorienting and liberating.

The novel opens with a beautiful paragraph about the narrator's (re?)birth, at 21, walking down a muddy road skirting a North African town, the rain just stopped, the last clouds caught fleeing in a puddle. Straight ahead of him stands an Arab, possibly a nobleman, a philosopher or a poet, staring at something. What that something might be, for the narrator, the reader, the novelist, the book, is what 'Odile' movingly explores.