STORIES AND REMARKS

This posthumously published collection of short prose pieces, as unclassifiable a book as any the accomplished French surrealist-mathematician-polymath (1903–76) ever produced, offers whimsically learned pleasures similar to those encountered in such quintessentially Queneauvian texts as The Sunday of Life and Exercises in Style. The influences of the fanciful surrealist Alfred Jarry and Queneau’s confederates (such as Italo Calvino) in the experimental Parisian writers’ group “Oulipo” are strongly felt in fragmentary jeux-like “Conversations in Greater Paris” and “Texticles”; witty variations on familiar tales (“Alice in France,” “The Trojan Horse”); and more ambitious narrative hybrids like the unfinished “At the Forest’s Edge” (in which a recurring Queneau “character,” Dino the talking dog, makes a memorable appearance). Especially interesting is Queneau’s only completed play, In Passing, which ingeniously echoes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Even at its most lightweight and fey, this engaging miscellany charms and teases with such imperturbable weirdness as the following (a “story” in its entirety): “I am in the country at the home of a doctor. He is grilling some eggplants and cutlets, which catch fire, then he plays the lute.” If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, then Raymond Queneau probably isn’t for you.