what we have here is a failure to communicate

by Raymond Queneau
translated by Barbara Wright

‘ “…it just happens, every so often, that something very ordinary seems beautiful to me and I’d like it to be eternal. I’d like this bistro, and that dusty light bulb, and that dog dreaming on the marble, and even this night – to be eternal. And their essential quality is precisely that they aren’t.” ‘ p. 24

‘Was life a continual surprise, then? … The world was playing with him. There was a secret behind this fishing port, there was a mystery behind this cliff, behind that milestone, behind that cigarette butt.‘ p. 155

This book explores the layers of reality that surround us, the realities that the individual creates for himself and those that are created by others for him, and how all those realities careen like bumper cars through the labyrinth of life. It points out that those realities are in constant flux, constantly in danger of collapsing, constantly needing to be tended through the use of stories, abstract thinking, poetry, etc. Or at least that was a part of the book that rose to the surface and resonated with me, for as Barbara Wright said in her introduction, ‘Queneau has no verbalized message. … He has nothing to sell – but when the reader finishes a Queneau book, he has become enriched.‘ That’s exactly how I feel – enriched.

Witch Grass was delightful. It’s comic misadventure kept me gleefully entertained, and the way Queneau turned new plot developments into little mysteries for his reader to solve made the journey such fun. There was a serious side to it all too, a bit of tragedy, a bit of the humdrum of life and the petty plotting of humans. The characters were brilliant – utterly ordinary and yet fantastic, by turns likable and unlikable, and nearly always understandable even in their most evil moments. It was an excellent book, both amusing and insightful.

On a stylistic note, this is of course a novel from the pen of one of the founders of the Oulipo group. It is full of experimental stuff. Aside from odd lists (which reminded me of Perec), funny conversation construction, and occasional stream-of-consciousness narrative, each of the seven chapters has thirteen sections – for complicated mathematical reasons as well as “egocentric” ones. Queneau liked things to be highly structured, and said “A novel is a little like a sonnet, although it is much more complicated.” He was only personally rigid though, and hoped that his little rules and techniques weren’t too obvious. “It would be terrible if it were obvious.” I love how quirky he seems! His intent upon starting the novel was to write something in ‘spoken French’, getting it down on the page in a way that more closely resembled how it sounded coming out of the mouths of the people on the street. Wright managed to carry this over into her translation, and so the book is full of words spelled oddly. When you say them out loud though, they do sound like the familiar way we mangle our spoken words.

I am thrilled to have made Queneau’s acquaintance and I’m eager to enjoy his company, and his peculiar forms of innovative storytelling, again.