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OdileAuthor: Raymond Queneau Translator: Carol Sanders French Literature Series December 1988 128 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-209-3 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $8.76 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $16.00—20% OFF! Hardcover Temporarily Out of Stock |
Book Description
"Even though I can't remember my childhood, my memory being as if ravaged by some disaster, there nevertheless remains a series of images from the time before my birth . . . of my first twenty years, only ruins are left in a memory devastated by unhappiness."
These opening lines from Queneau's novel, first published in France in 1937, are a brilliant, moving introduction to a story about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellectuals and artists whose activities range from writing for radical magazines to conjuring the ghost of Lenin in séances. Most of all, it's about Roland Travy's agonizing search for happiness after having been conditioned to live unhappily but safely for so long, about his growing self-awareness and need for another human being, about his willingness to shed his fears and accept his humanity.
About the Author
| Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) is acknowledged as one of the most influential of modern French writers, having helped determine the shape of twentieth-century French literature, especially in his role with the Oulipo, a group of authors that includes Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews, among others. |  |
About the Translator
| Carol Sanders has taught at universities in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and the West Indies. In recent years she has taught modules on French Sociolinguistics at the universities of Surrey and Kent. She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Kent. |
Praise
"Charming . . . Deliciously funny . . . Written in a cool detached style, full of witticism and puns, this is Queneau at his most accessible."—Publishers Weekly"A marvelous sendup of the Surrealists of the late 1920s and early 1930s as well as a moving love story . . . Both a madcap roman à clef . . . and a parable about the search for spiritual equilibrium and human meaning."—Kirkus Reviews
"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 to set his face against conclusions, and to be moved by a kind of horror of seriousness."—Albert Camus
"How can anyone not love Queneau?"—New Orleans Times-Picayune
"All in all, Odile is an extraordinary production, a book to be treasured."—Small Press