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Pierrot Mon Ami

Preface by Barbara Wright
Translated by Barbara Wright
Afterword by Inez Hedges

Paperback
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Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity.

This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau's principle translator).

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-397-9
ISBN-13 9781564783974
Publication Date Mar 2005
Nb of pages 159
Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Reviews

Press Reviews

Times Literary Supplement
"Pierrot Mon Ami was perhaps Queneau's masterpiece . . . This unlikely guru exerted a major influence on a new avant-garde (notably on Georges Perec, who was devoted to him). But if there was a sage in Queneau he never imparted his wisdom more touchingly than in Pierrot Mon Ami."

New Yorker
"We always feel good reading a Queneau novel; he is the least depressing of the moderns, the least heavy, with something Mozartian about the easy, self-pleasing flow of his absurd plots."

Hollins Critic
"A comic masterpiece."

Kirkus
"A brilliant, quirky novel by a French novelist whose reputation continues to grow in America."

Bloomsbury Review
"Bizarre . . . entertaining fiction."

The Guardian
"A jaunty little tale of unusual verbal dexterity . . . [T]he inventive vernacular of his books . . . is of course in no way ordinary."

Cityweek
"Loopily clever . . . inexhaustibly inventive, unremittingly disconcerting, overflowing with subversive energy, surrealistic wit, and rough-edged whimsy . . . All [of Barbara Wright's] translations
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Quotations

"Raymond Queneau's books are ambiguous fairylands in which scenes of everyday life are mingled with a melancholy that is ageless. Though they are not without bitterness, their author seems always
...more

-Albert Camus

"Pierrot Mon Ami is a poem on chance and destiny, on the relationship between what should have happened and what actually does happen . . . Pierrot represents one of the main types of the
...more

-Martin Esslin

"I must underline here the importance of the novels of Raymond Queneau, whose texture often and whose movement always are strictly those of the imagination."
-Alain Robbe-Grillet

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