Saint Glinglin (French Literature Series)

Queneau, Raymond

ISBN 10: 1564782301 / ISBN 13: 9781564782304

Editore: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000

Riguardo questo articolo

Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Codice articolo 00081647050

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Saint Glinglin (French Literature Series)
• Editore: Dalkey Archive Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1564782301
• ISBN 13: 9781564782304
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said "can be mentioned without incongruity in the company" of Mann'sMagic Mountain and Joyce's Ulysses. "By turns strange, beautiful, ludicrous, and intellectually stimulating" (as Mercier goes on to say),Saint Glinglin retells the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father in an array of styles ranging from direct narrative, soliloquy, and interior monologue to quasi-biblical verse.

In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints, playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale.

Informazioni sull?autore

Queneau was born in Le Havre in 1903 and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, his intentionality.

Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.