Raymond Queneau’s Dubliners

Raymond Queneau’s Dubliners PDF

Author: James Patrick Gosling

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-09-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1527539903

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This work is a broad-ranging exploration of two comic erotic and well-nigh feminist novels written by Raymond Queneau, On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes (1947) and Journal intime (1950). Both are set in Ireland, were initially published by Éditions du Scorpion under the pseudonym Sally Mara, and then later published together by Gallimard as Les Œuvres completes de Sally Mara (1962). The book examines Queneau’s life when he wrote these texts, the pervasive Joycean influences, his surreal version of the 1916 Dublin Uprising versus the real event, his remarkably accurate Dublin city and his use of the Irish language. The seven core chapters are explorations of prominent aspects of these works, and most involve the solution of puzzles by means of investigations of contexts, contemporary events, and a wide variety of sources. In conclusion, the book makes a convincing case for the literary and entertainment value of Les Œuvres completes de Sally Mara as a long-planned and subtly integrated work.

The Skin of Dreams

The Skin of Dreams PDF

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1681377713

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In this delightful, cinema-inspired daydream of a novel, an identity-shifting protagonist uses the everyday inspirations of his life to catapult himself into the realm of imagination, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L’Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L’Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale’s humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau’s great loves, the cinema.

Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire

Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire PDF

Author: M. Keith Booker

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 1995-10-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9780815626657

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This work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of carnivalisation to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasizes the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.

Sally Mara's Intimate Diary

Sally Mara's Intimate Diary PDF

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1628974877

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Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a salacious, black humorous and meaningful story by the influential and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’ begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother, older brother and younger sister in south central Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is writing in ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglot linguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write a novel of some kind in Irish. However, the action throughout is determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance of the mysteries of sex and reproduction. The often sensual and dark humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language and languages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of course with Dublinese. Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur throughout; these are not translated but, like some challenging French phrases, are supported by footnotes. In 1949, when Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under the pseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by James Joyce and fascinated by the limitations of language. He was also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion, publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal intime.

The Sunday of Life

The Sunday of Life PDF

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780811206457

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The Sunday of Life, the late Raymond Queneau's tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Bru, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naif. Highly self-conscious yet reasonably satisfied with his lot, imbued with the good humor inherent in the naturally wise, Valentin meets the painful nonsense of life's adventures with a slightly bewildered detachment.

Witch Grass

Witch Grass PDF

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2003-01-31

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9781590170311

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Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts of the city of lights. Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing book about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.