In the Labyrinth (English and French Edition)

Alain Robbe-Grillett

Penguin Books/ Oneworld

On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this apparently unexceptional tale ninety- nine times, employing the sonnet and the alexandrine, Ze Frrench and Cockney , while an Abusive chapter heartily deplores the events. When Exercises in Style first appeared in French in 1947, it led to Queneau s election to the highly prestigious Acade?mie Goncourt. This virtuoso set of themes and variations is a linguistic rust-remover, a guide to literary forms, a demonstration of the use of imagery and expletive. But it is far too funny to be merely a pedantic thesis. The late Raymond Queneau, novelist, poet, mathematician and editor, once told Barbara Wright that of all his books, this was the one he most wished to see translated. He rendered her his ''heartiest congratulations'', adding: ''I have always thought that nothing is untranslatable. Here is new proof. And it is accomplished with all the intended humour. It has not only linguistic knowledge and ingenuity, it has that.''

Exercises in Style

Literature & Fiction

Raymond Queneau

Classics

Erasers

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Flight of Icarus

In late nineteenth-century Paris, the writer Hubert is shocked to discover that Icarus, the protagonist of the new novel he s working on, has vanished. Looking for him among the manuscripts of his rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is hired to find the runaway character, who is now in Montparnasse, where he learns to drink absinthe and is picked up by a friendly prostitute.  These hilarious adventures make Queneau s novel, presented in the form of a script and parodying various genres, one of the best literary jokes in modern literature.

When Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks, having been brutally raped and murdered. Slowly and inexorably the tiny details accumulate as Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the crime. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning. Did the crime only exist in the mind of Mathias?This brilliantly executed novel, using all the techniques that have made Robbe-Grillet's works unique, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

Voyeur

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