As you'd expect from a posthumous collection of short pieces spanning most of Queneau's career, this is a bit patchy. There are some absolutely brilliant short pieces — in particular "Alice en France" (where else could she find somewhere stranger than Wonderland or the Looking-glass?), the essay discussing the often-neglected effect of the wind on addition, the delightfully random fragments of overheard dialogue, and the "Texticules" — but there are also pieces where I couldn't work out what Queneau was trying to achieve. My copy is a cheapo "folio" paperback without any critical apparatus, so you can never be quite sure if a piece was meant to be like that, or was simply unfinished, which adds to the fun.

It was interesting to see how Queneau's interests shifted from experiments with meaning and narrative in the earlier part of the book to playing around with the patterns and sounds of language in the later works. The "Texticules" are the most famous examples of this. Not really prose poems, because a poem uses structures and patterns in language to support the meaning the poet is trying to convey, whereas Queneau starts out with an oddity of language (homophones, bizarre rhymes and assonances, bad puns, sentences in which the only vowel is "u", etc.) and then constructs a meaning to exploit that oddity. The more offbeat and unlikely the combination of ideas he needs in order to get there, the better. Great fun, and even with my fairly basic knowledge of French I had the feeling that they were taking me into subtleties of the way language works I wouldn't otherwise have thought about. ( )

Not the place to start, but I'm happy for the collection of these small peices. ( )

Few writers can claim as various and influential a body of work as Raymond Queneau, and nearly every aspect of his distinctive art is on offer in this slender volume. The twenty-one short pieces included here range in date of authorship from the twenties, when Queneau was a young man deeply involved in the surrealist project, to the early seventies, well after he’d made his reputation as the founder of the Oulipo group. As well as chronological diversity, the book demonstrates considerable formal diversity; it contains fablelike stories, fragments of uncompleted novels, pseudoacademic treatises, “texticles,�? and even a playlet. Not surprising then, that there’s a hodgepodge quality to the collection. Stories and Remarks is saved from being a mere desk-clearing effort, though, by at least two things. First, the translator, Marc Lowenthal, has extensively annotated each story and almost every remark, providing a publishing history and establishing a context for them all. More important, there’s a consistent tone of humor throughout. Some have termed Queneau’s brand of comedy black, since he considered any subject, scatological or eschatological, as pun worthy, but his attitude wasn’t bitter enough to warrant that assessment. Here as elsewhere in his oeuvre, whimsy abounds and the darkest mood is one of rueful amusement at the banality of life. Lowenthal notes that Queneau’s first published work was an account of a dream, and the final piece in this miscellany, written near the end of his life, purports to recount several more. The events of each narrative are mundane—a woman shells peas, another walks a cat on a leash—but their atmosphere is the recognizable strangeness of our own nocturnal imaginings. It turns out that the bland tales are true and the only oneiric quality about them is the intentionally stilted way in which they’re told. Queneau may have begun by turning a dream into prose, but by the end of his fifty-odd-year career, he could make the most prosaic detail dreamy.