Odile

by Raymond Queneau, Carol Sanders (Translator & Introduction)

“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.

Genres: Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, Humor, Novels, Walking

119 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Novelist, poet, and critic Raymond 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, and 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.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking for a place in the sun… Searching for a niche in the intellectual world…

There isn’t only the world that you see or that you think you see, or that you imagine you see, the world that the blind feel, that the armless hear and the deaf smell, this world of objects and forces, of things solid or illusory, this world of life and death, of birth and destruction, this world where we drink and in which we go to sleep. There’s at least one more than I know of: the world of numbers and figures, of identities and functions, of operations and groups, of sets and spaces.

He is young… He returns from the war… He needs friends… He gets acquainted with swindlers and pimps… They belong to the different circle… They are all self-serving and he has nothing in common with them…

How can I speak about the way my relationship with one or another person began and evolved, when they are no more to me now than slightly shifting statues that stir slightly, no more than minimally mobile robots that move a fraction, like puppets whose rib cages can fill out to give the impression of human breath?

He befriends a group of anarchists and radicals… They also believe in mysticism, occultism and spiritualism… They’re all liars, frauds, mountebanks, charlatans and demagogues…  

“We must bring about the Revolution by the most radically infrapsychic means and fight the bourgeoisie with what disgusts it most: excrement.”

He is disappointed in everything… And only his friendship with Odile brings some comfort… 

But over and above all that, there was my friendship with Odile, which was making me more and more uncertain of my own unhappy fate. I no longer forged blindly ahead like a projectile. Little by little I was emerging from the darkness into which I had stumbled with my eyes closed.

Often we find happiness so far away from the place where we have been seeking it for years.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

GLI ULTIMI GIORNI



Odile non è un romanzo autobiografico, ma racconta fatti accaduti nella vita di Queneau, a cominciare dai due viaggi che incorniciano la storia, quello in Marocco e quello in Grecia.

E soprattutto racconta il suo rapporto con il surrealismo e il suo fondatore, André Breton, qui chiamato Anglarès. Fu lo stesso Queneau a dichiarare quanto scrivere Odile gli sia servito a prendere le distanze da quel movimento per il quale a un certo punto nutriva “una detestazione appassionata".

Solo che in Odile non sono solo i surrealisti a diventare bersaglio di presa in giro: è facile rintracciare molta dell’avanguardia intellettuale, e il marxismo.


Raymond Queneau: Autoritratto.

Odile è un’educazione sentimentale. Quella di Roland Travy, l’unico protagonista io narrante messo in scena da Queneau.
Travy è timido, come lo era il suo autore, mantiene distacco dalle cose e dalla gente, sembra indifferente, sembra portato a non scegliere, sembra spaventato dai sentimenti. Ed è grazie a Odile, che Queneau lascia indeterminata, concisa, più importante per il suo effetto che in quanto personaggio, è grazie a Odile che Travy scopre i sentimenti e comprende quanto dietro il suo essere e comparire ci sia orgoglio e isolamento.



Parlavo di cornice, dei due viaggi posti uno all’inizio e alla fine del breve romanzo: in Marocco Travy incontra un vecchio arabo immobile che guardia la campagna e il cielo, in Grecia, nell’isola di Paros c’è l’incontro con un altro vecchio, quello del mulino a vento.
In questo percorso, Odile è a suo modo un romanzo piuttosto lineare, che sembra giungere a un qualche risultato esistenziale per il suo protagonista, da Goffredo Fofi nell’introduzione così sintetizzato: affannarsi non giova, si è comunque vissuti più che non si viva, e vale soltanto accettarsi, accettare, cercare nell’ironia un'ancora di lucidità.


Raymond Queneau: Autoritratto.

In Odile Queneau sceglie un linguaggio più comune, più vicino al parlato, e quindi all’argot, senza quel tripudio di calembour, di gioco e invenzione linguistica, di commistione, neologismi che fanno la fortuna dei suoi libri più celebri (Zazie, I fiori blu…).

Quando questa storia comincia, mi trovo sulla strada che va da Bou Jeloud a Bad Fetouh costeggiando le mura della città. È piovuto. Le pozzanghere riflettono le ultime nuvole. Il fango si attacca ai chiodi dei miei scarponi. Sono sporco e malvestito, un militare reduce da quattro mesi di colonna. Davanti a me un arabo immobile guarda la campagna e il cielo, poeta, filosofo, nobile.


Il titolo di Liberation del 26 ottobre 1976, il giorno dopo la morte di Queneau.

[Helga چـو ایـران نباشد تن من مـباد · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

My eyes still blinked when I looked at the world, but at least I looked.

This is a story about a soldier who returns to France after months of staying in Morocco with an expeditionary force. But for someone who has seen villages burn down and men killed what is left but unhappiness and memories of ruins and devastation.

He comes back physically intact, but ravaged by fear of living his life like a normal person; of finding happiness; of discovering the meaning of life and understanding himself; of falling in love.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ex-soldier and mathematics obsessive returns from expeditionary duty in Morocco to Queneau's milieu par excellence, Paris. Without family and only a few lingering connections from the army, he wanders about attempting to define himself in the context of two groups of people: the lowlifes and petty crooks who are associated with his former army friends, and a band of eccentric spiritualist Marxists who clearly are Queneau's parody of the French Surrealists, a group that he was associated with and broke from early on. The reasons for the breaking-with are illustrated herein. But what Odile is really about, beyond the mocking of dialectical materialism and the ridiculously phony intellectualism of "artistic revolutionaries" in 1930's Paris, is how difficult it is to quit the childish habit of defining yourself against things, and accept that being normal is not only not so bad, it is also something that takes a great deal of intelligence and effort and humility. That a good life is not necessarily an exceptional life; and that to choose happiness takes actual courage. Can Queneau write a bad book?

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revolutionary musings woven around the buoyant intellectual Parisian café scene of the 30s woven around a love story that was a bit of a damp squib. Semi-autobiographical in nature but I just prefer Queneau for his full-on quirky humour, imagination, and the style he embraced in later works, which was lacking. Less interested in the 'Spirit of Lenin' here and more interested in the spirits used in the hot toddies. Queneau's narrator flirts with communism through a group led by an André Breton type figure, when I'd much rather he was flirting with the love interest Odile. Thankfully, they would end up tying the knot.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was instance whre it looked as if Three Stars was the destined outcome before the Author brought one back in stoppage time. Queneau shined when he pushed aside his scathing satire and exhibited honest insecurity and sentiment in the final 30 pages.

The Surrealists and Marxists received equal abuse in this curious vehicle. It is a witty triumph.

[Yves S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, Surrealism, to my knowledge the only literary religion, with its Pope, its encyclicals, its dogmas, and its noisy excommunications!!

What a charming literary movement and yet, such bickering, pettiness, and spite!

It somehow reminds me of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, an irresistible attraction towards self-destruction.

In Queneau’s Odile everything is said about the surrealist movement, about these nasty tensions, these dark aspects tending towards inquisitive religion.
For all that, for Queneau’s prose and his firsthand experience, it is a captivating book in which I was so caught up that I read it all in one go, in one night. This is something in itself worth noting as that almost never happens to me.

*****

Ah, le surréalisme, la seule religion littéraire à ma connaissance, avec son Pape, ses encycliques, ses dogmes et ses bruyantes excommunications !!

Quel charme dans ce mouvement mais aussi quelles horreurs !

Nous trouvons dans tout cela ce que Poe nommait le démon de la perversité, une attirance vers l’autodestruction.

Dans Odile tout est dit sur le mouvement surréaliste, sur ces tensions, sur ces aspects tendant à la religion inquisitrice. C’est un livre magnifique dans lequel je fus tellement pris que je l’ai lu tout d’un trait, en une nuit. Cela ne m’arrive presque jamais.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another installment in Queneau's trilogy of romans à clef. The other two novels, The Last Days and A Hard Winter (translated to English but hasn't been reprinted since 1938!) re-imagine Queneau's youth in a bittersweet and often self-critical way.

This novel is about the perils of trying to live a unique and different life to everyone else. (Who are also trying to live unique and different lives). No matter how hard the protagonist tries, how mathematically he orders his world, he can't escape his feelings for the bland-spoken Odile.

A satire on the Communist movement in 1930s Paris (and attack on Breton's Surrealists) is also here in all its teeth-bearing splendour.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about a feckless young intellectual's life before he somehow finds himself. In many ways, it reminds me of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Except, Raymond Queneau is very French, and Odile is so French that it almost have been a nouvelle vague film by Truffaut or Godard.

Roland Travy is a fellow traveler who lives on the edges of communism as he hangs out with a bunch of pseudo-psychics with Marxist pretensions, centered around a strange mesmerizing figure named Anglares with his long hair and pince-nez. One of the group, a painter called simply Vladislav recounts

how he had practiced necrophilia on a stormy day in Brittany and how he could only paint barefoot while sniffing at a handkerchief soaked in absinth and how in the country after the summer rains he sat down in warm mud to get back in contact with mother nature and how he ate raw meat tenderized a la Attila the Hun, which made it absolutely delicious. Listening to him, no one could doubt he was a painter of genius.

... and so on ad infinitum. Naturally, everyone dreads being bourgeois and has a vague hankering after some idealized proletariat that they would would appreciate the quasi-efforts these young men and women are making on their behalf. (But they never do, do they?)

Odile Clarion is a young woman in Roland's crowd toward whom he feels drawn in a vague way. He even marries her, though lives apart from her. Eventually, Roland realizes the shallowness of his life and actually develops some feelings for Odile.

This novel makes me want to read more by Queneau. It is one of the best novels about youth -- especially the intellectual variety -- that I have ever read.

[GloriaGloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pensavo di averlo perduto molti anni fa questo libro, e nella futile vita di un lettore tutto ciò equivale a un microdramma, invece oggi è ricomparso all'improvviso. Se fossi un demente newage saprei dare una risposta a questo scherzo del caso, invece mi tocca star qui a chiedermi se venti anni e più di polvere lo abbiano reso un potenziale portatore microbi omicidi. L'odore c'è tutto. Per cui non lo rileggerò, ma lo ricordo perfettamente, quindi qualcosa vorrà dire.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read the New York Review Books edition of Raymond Queneau's WITCH GRASS in October of 2016 I was utterly taken aback. I thought it to be perhaps the greatest debut novel I had ever read, better than the two subsequent Queneau novels I had tallied-up by that point, and marveled that I so rarely hear or see it discussed, as though my assessment were anything but the consensus. I have now read six Queneau novels, and I still think WITCH GRASS is my favourite. It is a novel that not only presages the Oulipo group, the nouvelle roman, and postmodern fiction of every stripe, but that looks forward to the wild imagination, linguistic pyrotechnics, philosophical dynamism, and fiercely critical sensibility I associate with Queneau's later works more than those that more immediately followed his debut. ODILE, for example, is a very different beast than is WITCH GRASS, whereas THE BLUE FLOWERS, his penultimate novel and personal favourite from among his own works, strikes me as fundamentally conterminous with it. Though ODILE is far less experimental and ambitious than WITCH GRASS, it is nevertheless pretty astonishing. One suspects that it was written with comparatively commercial aspirations; while there might well be reason to carp about this, I think most will ultimately be won over by the material on its own terms, as was I. ODILE is essentially a roman a roman à clef that deals, through first-person narration, with Queneau's actual experiences having returned to Paris from military service in Morocco in 1926. Queneau is refigured as Roland Travay, a fairly laid-back quasi-antisocial layabout with math on the mind who becomes embroiled with communists, thugs, and most of all a fictional version of the Surrealists (whose dictatorial overseer André Breton becomes Anglarès within the pages of the novel), while at the same time slowly coming to terms with a self-defeating intellectual blockage manifesting itself as a kind of amorous neurosis. Readers in large part familiar with Queneau's biography will quickly become aware of the fact that the novel pretty liberally reimagines many of the specifics. In the novel, Travay was born in Paris, whereas Queneau was born and raised in Le Havre. Queneau's real life wife was André Breton's sister-in-law, whereas the eponymous Odile, her literary counterpart, is part of a microcommunity entirely peripheral to Anglarès'. Queneau's alteration of facts and periodic skewing of background seems to be coupled, especially at first, with something like an effort to construct an exaggerated (even perhaps genuinely misleading) conceptual persona. Queneau represents himself as kind of blithely sophisticated, hardboiled, and difficult to faze. In reading ODILE, we may be inclined on occasion to think of the mythic self-construction of modernist writers like Henry Miller and Jean Genet. I beseech you to look at the following three sentences: "We said good-bye. I watched her ass vanish into the distance. It vanished." My word! What are we to make of this? Very Henry Miller. I find it hard to imagine that Queneau was a fellow especially inclined to make note to himself of a lady departing in such a manner, heh heh, but, hell, what do I know? If a species of feeble toughness, hardheadedness, and dearth of empathy make Roland Travy less than sympathetic, especially at first, and if it would indeed render entirely reasonable accusations of mysogyny (there is also a little homophobia going on), not only does this speak to the less-than-evolved sensibilities of the era being represented, but also cleverly sets the stage for the character's elevation to a higher level of mindfulness late in the book (making ODILE something not unlike Bildungsroman). Perhaps the most amusing element in the book's construction of a conceptual persona comes right at the very beginning, when the narrator tells us that he literally has no memories of his youth -- that his memories only commence in Morocco, those of a man already in his early twenties. What an amusing thing to wish people to imagine true of you! As much of the book is ironic nearly to the point of being outright parodic, it is hard not to see Queneau as also a writer here intent on having some fun taking himself down a peg. The fragility of his own construction, perhaps even its self-conscious flimsiness, is addressed outright: "Of myself as I was then," he writes, "I have retained only the image of a fairground toy, the mediocre slow-motion demonstration of reality that escaped me then." The way the bulk of the irony (almost at times venomous) is deployed in the novel occasionally results in something that becomes polemic-by-other-means; such business can be a tricky business indeed, but here I mean that in the best way possible. Queneau is ruthless in his treatment of Breton (in the form of Anglarès), the Surrealists, and the sundry increasingly-fanatical radicals who traipse through Paris making a complete goddamn mess, stabbing one another in the back, and never missing a chance to bicker over one ill-advised, callow course of action after another. Queneau disavows his old friends and makes an exemplary, detailed case for having so done. The problem is surely not with this particular misguided cadre of friends in particular. It is the ubiquity of “intergroup politicking” that Queneau most disdains, and, hey, yeah, I'm with you, Ray. I grew up in love with radical politics and combative artistic avant-gardes, but had to concede at a certain point the soundness of the criticism that I, like artists and committed thinkers in general, am a kind of bourgeois individualist. Though I am a kind of anarchist I have to concede that I am equally something of a solitary aristocrat, even if not really belonging anywhere, constructing my own periphery, populated only by myself. Queneau obviously came out on the side of the solitary creative pursuit. I find it to his credit, and he makes a gangbusters case for it. The comedy of his critique is occasionally truly delicious. Anglarès and his fellow travelers are obsessed with the "infrapsychic" (delightful word) and competing incoherent regimes of dialectical materialism. Travay, as stated, in obsessed with math. He speaks lovingly of Plato and comes off as something of a Kantian. Mathematics are hardly de rigueur in the literary novel (though they underpin all Queneau would go on to do, even if primarily at a formal-structural level). Rarer still are literary elaborations of mathematical ideas and principles. Queneau goes there in ODILE. Travay goes on about math in a number of fascinating passages. He extemporizes on “research on what I called the induction of infinite sequences and Parseval’s integrals, on what I defined as right addition and left addition with complex numbers and the importance of these operations for combinatorial topology.” Is not "combinatorial topology" a concept which would seem to get to the heart of Queneau's entire body of work? If much of ODILE is ironic, especially from the standpoint of the critique it mounts, is arrives at a place of profound and revelatory earnestness. I spoke of a self-defeating intellectual blockage manifesting itself as a kind of amorous neurosis. It is by way of Travay's late extrication from his neural entanglement that the book reaches extraordinary heights. Is is by virtue of becoming a love story? By consecrating monogamous amorous coupling? Yes and no. You see, I was a little worried about this. I myself had many lovers when I was young, a pair of whom I was bound to lengthily in implicitly committed relationships, but I have become a very self-satisfied Thomas Merton-type, prone to exalting my solitary mode of being, so I am hardly the audience for novels about wayward men saved by the love of a good woman. Also: should go without saying that I am more interested in Quneau's art than in his domestic situation, no matter how merry it may be. I think part of the genius here is that the self-defeating intellectual blockage endured by Roland Travay is born precisely of a self-destructive compulsion to have the novel he is living NOT be a love story. At, like, any cost, no matter how steep. He resists such an outcome to the point of something not unlike madness. At a certain point the reader almost wants to shake him by the collar and demand he get a grip. Until he relents. The amorous component of the novel, whereby Travay allows himself to love Odile, eventuating a provisional resolution, manifests itself in the form of a legitimate spiritual awakening (with multiple contingent components). This is its power; a spiritual power. That I can get behind. The construction of the novel is exquisite and lends itself to a palpable sense of breakthrough. The final pages are an utter triumph, masterpiece stuff, but the structure has been engineered to accommodate it. There is perhaps a central image in ODILE. It comes at the beginning, coincides with our narrator being born to awareness (and the belated ability to make memories), and returns numerous times throughout the book, marking shifts in bearing and momentary immersion in the potential richness, the hallowed mystery, of life. The image is of a contemplative, anonymous Arab man standing impassively on the road between Bou Jeloud and Bab Fetouh gazing upon something unknown. It is an image possessing talismanic properties. I shall take it with me.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odile is probably most valuable as a fairly clear statement of Queneau's position amongst his less respectable peers of the time. Queneau never moved in lock step with any trends of the time and this book states that fairly clearly. It's a love story in some ways but you wouldn't expect to Queneau to gush, coo or otherwise pitch-woo so if you are generally put off by such things - you're safe here. There's nothing overly complex or intellectual here but Queneau's amongst pseudo-intellectuals is central to Odile. Basically - this is about a man who wants to enrich his life through thoughts and when he finds little solace in this - it's a Faustian love that wins his interest near the conclusion of this short read. I could have gone without reading this and appreciation of Queneau wouldn't suffer. There's little of the extreme creativity and intellectual absurdity of his other works present and I think it's pretty easy to understand what his reaction to the ismisms (yeah -too much 10CC lately) that have survived in the lazier art history books of our time might have been. But if you're at the point where you're reading the deeper cuts of the Queneau catalog you're probably also pretty skeptical of the importance of such "movements" anyway. Having said that - I really did enjoy this brief and clarifying read - I understand the writer a bit more now but am looking forward to more time with his less linear works. If you're looking for post-Jarry absurdist verbal fireworks - Blue Flowers or Witch Grass would be better.

[Vittorio Ducoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un Queneau dimesso, una Parigi fantastica

Piccolo romanzo quasi autobiografico, narra del distacco del protagonista, nella Parigi degli anni '20, dai vuoti movimenti dell'avanguardia intellettuale e politica (il surrealismo di Breton) e della sua tribolata accettazione dell'amore per una donna (Odile), a lungo negato in quanto "banale" e "borghese".
E' un Queneau un po' dimesso, anche nello stile di scrittura, che tuttavia si legge volentieri immergendosi nell'atmosfera di straordinaria vitalità di quella che era allora la capitale culturale del mondo.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yup. Crazy to read this after The Bark Tree. No tricks. The high flown circles Roland ran with appraised his individualism a bit too much, mainly through his sheer rejection of all of them. Failed to ‘see’ the woman, and more crucially, the splendor of simple love itself. When he had confessed to Odile the very futility of his ‘research’ into pascalian mathematics, I knew he had loved her, despite all of his back and forth with Vincent. This book almost ran a moderate course, until the last thirty pages changed up the gas. Lessons were learned. Good one. Giving it to Max right now.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting (and encouraging): without the trademark puns and surreal quirkiness-- or, I guess, with only indications of them, as they were being developed for full use in later books-- Queneau was a pretty mediocre novelist. This early book is dull, and kind of a mess.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

shares a similarity to The Savage Detectives and A Moveable Feast, but is more critical of the movement it represents than the others. I loved it and I’m thinking of running back over to the used book store to pick up the other Queneau books that were there

thank you Dalkey Archive for existing

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A main character who tries his best not to turn his life into a love story and, at the last moment, realizes his error, much to my relief.

[Max B · Rating 5 out of 5]

No matter how hard you try, you can’t help but fall in love with a woman. Thanks, Justin, for lending me this.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than two thirds of the novel is given over to an often funny, occasionally heavy-handed, critique of Surrealism and early 20th century French intellectualism. I didn't really find that aspect to be very compelling, especially since the narrative is so uncharacteristically straightforward. But this critique is book-ended by Queneau's ideas about creativity, literary experimentation, and the dangers of rigid thinking, which completely recast the rest of the novel for me. Instead of reading it merely as a rejection of innovation and game-play -- Travy returns to his combinatorial mathematics shortly before he returns to Odile -- I read it as a rejection of play for the sake of play and doctrinal certainty in any area, but especially in art. Like all of Queneau's work, it's a celebration of intellectual liberty. Of course, Odile is also a love story that doesn't realize it's a love story until the last ten or so pages, which is pretty wonderful, too. (Only Queneau could be inventive by being so formulaic, giving us his aesthetics wrapped in a bildungsroman and a love story.)

[Stevolende · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this really amusing and a bit surreal in places.
Weird structure in it being 117 pages of continuous prose. It does at least paragraph but otherwise has no chapters, gaps or other page breaks.
It tells the story of Roland Travy returned from years in the army and hanging around with some radical reprobates in a rundown part of Paris.
I've wanted to read Queneau's novel Le Chiendent for decades, Rowland S Howard had it in his list in Portrait of teh Artist asa Consumer in his Birthday Party days. I wound up looking to see if Icould order it through inter library loan but couldn't see it. Did find teh local library had some of his taht I had somehow overlooked. THis was one of them.
So found it quite moving . Will hopefully read We Always Treat Women Too Well before long. & maybe finish Zazie Dans Le Metro too, saw the film of that a few months ago.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 4 out of 5]

A relatively straight-forward narrative marked by frequent conversations ranging between ironic and earnest in tone, usually covering multiple sides of some idea. The love story gathers momentum slowly, with Odile remaining peripheral for much of the story while Roland Travy grapples with past shame, present unhappiness, and a group of constantly feuding literati who bear a pretty obvious resemblance to Breton's surrealist group. Even without the love story, the crispness of the sentences would have kept the young-man's-self-discovery narrative from toppling under its own weight -- but I'm glad it's a part of the novel, nevertheless.

[Paolo Rinco · Rating 4 out of 5]

altro brillante racconto di Queneau su come le relazioni umane vengono influenzate da ciò che le circonda persino dalla politica ma tuttavia l'uomo rimane alla fine il solo arbitro del proprio destino! Sartre e l'esistenzialismo docet!

[Stéphane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un roman qui manque résolument de structure et qui passe d'un thème à un autre sans achever de denouer les brins de chaque peloton.
Quelques fils passionants quand même et un personnage au final attachant surtout dans les 25 dernières pages du roman.

[Paul Sonnenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

For much of this book, I was carried along only by mild interest. But, by the end, I was moved it away I haven't been in a long time by a book. I feel that there is much in this book for me to learn about my own life. I will come back to it again until I have learned it.

[Carlo Mayer]

Finiti

[Fx Smeets · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five star for the brilliant satire of Breton's little court and the formidable precision of the style, from a writer who was still in his thirties.

[Michael Pennington · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an odd little story. At first I didn’t think anything at all of it but then it all came together rather beautifully.

[Facundo Aranzet · Rating 3 out of 5]

—No hay un solo mundo—le digo—, el mundo que usted ve o el mundo que se imagina estar viendo o el que quiere ver, ese mundo que los ciegos tocan, que oyen los amputados y que olfatean los sordos, ese mundo de cosas y fuerzas, de solideces o ilusiones, ese mundo de vida y de muerte, de nacimientos y de destrucciones, ese mundo en el que bebemos, en medio del cual tenemos la costumbre de dormirnos. Existe por lo menos uno más, que yo sepa: el de los números y las figuras, las identidades y las funciones, las operaciones y los grupos, los conjuntos y los espacios. Como sabrá, hay quien afirma que todo eso no es más que un cúmulo de abstracciones, construcciones, combinaciones. Quieren hacernos creer en una especie de arquitectura; primero se van a buscar los elementos en la naturaleza, se los refina, se los pule, se los diseca y el espíritu humano construye con ellos los ladrillos de una mansión espléndida, prueba magistral del poderío de la razón. No me cabe duda de que conoce esta teoría, su profesor de filosofía se la habrá defendido: no hay teoría más vulgar. ¡Un solar en construcción!

¿Qué satisfacción puede sacar uno de no entender algo?

Nada se borra y nada se perdona: así es la ley.

—Todos tenemos en nosotros facultades proféticas—dijo Anglarés—, pero no a todos nos es dado descubrirlas. Es preciso que la razón se calle y que la inteligencia se oscurezca, hay que dejarse arrastrar hacia los abismos del infrapsiquismo, entonces conocemos el futuro.

«superstición es la morfina de los obreros»,

Viajar es esperar

Hay dos formas de no poseer una cualidad: por incapacidad o por desdén: porque nos encontramos en un plano superior o bien porque nos encontramos en un plano inferior.

El verdadero inspirado nunca está inspirado: lo está siempre; no busca la inspiración ni se irrita contra técnica alguna.

Ser un hombre en el mundo en el que debía vivir, ésa era ya una tarea ardua y difícil, cuanto más difícil que morderse los dientes o caminar patas arriba.

[Brian James · Rating 3 out of 5]

How does one fill the emptiness that has been left inside after the experiences of war? How does one search for meaning in a world where humanity feels bankrupt? These are the questions at the heart of Queneau's novel about a young man in Paris during the years following the first world war. Somewhat absent the usual wit and playfulness of many of his other works, this is a more serious look at human society (though to be sure, flashes of his wit and playfulness do show through). And while this novel is about a specific place and specific time, the overarching themes serve us well in our current climate of post-truth and increasing cultural bankruptcy.

The cast of eccentric characters who populate this novel embrace the politics of socialism to satisfy their unhappiness. But they never embrace the ideals of the movement, only the idea of being part of the movement while they find ways to subvert it and turn it into a game that attempts to create meaning, purpose, and amusement in their lives which feel rudderless. Travy, the main character, never fully commits to the charade, only to the destiny of unhappiness. As is often the case in life, love becomes the great equalizer, helping him to recover his sense of humanity and discover what the true meaning of life must be, because love is the only true thing we have.

[Daniela · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Odile" de Raymond Queneau es una obra fascinante que combina ingenio literario con una trama intrigante. En esta novela, Queneau nos presenta a Odile, una mujer enigmática cuya presencia en la vida de los personajes desencadena una serie de eventos inesperados y divertidos. A través de un estilo narrativo ágil y lleno de humor, el autor nos sumerge en un mundo de situaciones absurdas y diálogos ingeniosos. La caracterización de los personajes es especialmente destacable, con cada uno aportando su propia singularidad a la historia. Además, Queneau juega con la estructura narrativa de manera innovadora, manteniendo al lector comprometido y sorprendido en todo momento. Si bien la trama puede parecer caótica en ocasiones, es precisamente esta imprevisibilidad lo que hace que "Odile" sea una lectura tan entretenida y memorable. En resumen, esta novela es una joya del humor inteligente y una excelente muestra del talento de Queneau como escritor.