Clever wordplay without anything else snot literature to me, hens I'm happy to run away from this thing toot sweet. And I'm snot too sure its all that clever, either. ( )

The Publisher Says: Garréta’s first new novel in a decade follows two young sisters who are dragged into one adventure after another when their father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister, Poulette, is subsumed by concrete.

Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to modernize—or fundamentally undercut—the elasticity of communication.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm old enough to remember reading Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau during the early-1980s height of Valley-Girl speak. It was snortingly urged on me by an older film-school-attending friend, whose encounter with Queneau's 1959 breakout novel was prompted by seeing Louis Malle's 1960 film of the same title. He said that Queneau did it better than the Valley Girls. I was, after reading Barbara Wright's translation, inclined to agree.

So here's Anne Garréta pulling the same stunt as Queneau, her spiritual godparent and co-founder of Oulipo, to which organization she belongs, pulled sixty years before. Is that hommage or le plagiat? After chortlesnorting my way through In Concrete, I'll go with hommage and a darn funny one at that.

I'm not at all sure, to be honest, that our narrator is a sex-linked girl; there's nothing in the text that specifically says she is, and there's a certain je ne sais quoi to the narrative voice that leads me to wonder if she isn't trans. It just *feels* that way. And given Queneau's Zazie has impeccable gaydar, ascertaining Gabriel is queer in seconds flat and constantly offering him chances to own up to it (he's a married drag entertainer, so there's your ambiguity for you) which he declines repeatedly (it was 1959), it would fit well with Mme Garréta's presumptive model and her earlier project (see above) for this to be so but unsaid.

Anyway. Manic energy, fun little not-quite-right malapropisms in a precocious kid's foul mouth, a family life that (for once) is loving while still being supremely dysfunctional...and all just as French as bœuf bourguignon. Does that sound like fun? I did to me, and I'm delighted to report that Translator Ramadan delivers verbal pyrotechnics that land just right. I know they did in French, not from having read them...waaay too advanced for me!...but because they were lauded by French critics for their anarchic jubilance. Having them come anywhere close to the original is a major achievement. Though not a surprise, given the nature of her translation of Sphinx as a linguistic exercise in French coming through in English as well.

Here, try this piece:

Lucky, they say, are those to whom the favor of the gods—or if not the favor of the gods then paternal klutziness—grants the privilege of experiencing things that deserve to be scribed!

Lucky also, it seems, are those who are entrusted to scribe on the tablets the things that deserved to be recorded, such as paternal klutziness and lapidary scatastrophes!

And even luckier are those, like Poulette and me, who are given the double privilege of finding themselves encased in greasy mortar and feeding the koalas.

Yup, the koalas . . .

Don't ask me why koalas . . . Can't you see it snot a good time?!

As for klutziness, if you don't know what that is, let's just say to keep it short that it's the specialty of generals, of top brass and rulers. But snot just them. Klutziness worms its way into everything. No need to be a high roller to be swimming in it. Klutziness has no end, no limit, and it's within the reach of any ol' poodle.

Epic klutziness, imperial klutziness, the lurid panache of klutziness pushed to heroic apogee and even to entropic scatastrophe—I fear we're the last of the klutzes.

We're not the last, are we, but we might just be looking at 'em. ( )

A solid book and funny with its play on words. I am sure that I didn’t get everything that I was supposed to get from this book but overall I liked it. I’d like to know more about these sisters and their life. ( )

There is fun and clever wordplay in this novel which appeared on the 2022 Tournament of Books shortlist, but there was not much of a plot, and some of the jokes got tiresome quickly. Fortunately, it was a short book, or else I would have bailed. The part I liked best was the translator's notes at the end which I found especially interesting. ( )

This is a novel made up almost entirely of wordplay, leaving no room, really, for a plot of any kind. And because the original wordplay was in French and the translated wordplay is in English, I suspect that the original and the translation are perhaps two very different books. I also suspect that there's some commentary here about rural France and, as indicated by the translator's note, about feminism that I'm just not catching. My loss? ( )