The Blue Flowers (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Raymond Queneau (Author), Barbara Wright (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (April 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811209458
• ISBN-13: 978-0811209458
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #362,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ultimate in literary 'vice versa'., August 30, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blue Flowers (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

'The Blue Flowers' is the most lovable of all Raymond Queneau's novels, one of those rare books you never want to end (for me, the only others I can think of are 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Dance to the music of time'). It relates two paralell narratives (or rather - and Queneau is the great mathematical novelist! - base and perpendicular narratives): the historical narrative of the endearingly aggressive Duc d'Auge, nay-sayer to royal authority and public opinion, friend of Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade, and debunker of religion to the extent of daubing on caves in the Perigord region to 'prove' the existence of humanity before Adam; his three daughters, including the defective, bleating Phelise, and their small-minded spouses; his squire Mouscaillot and their talking horses, philosophical Demosthenes and taciturn Stef; and his clerical foils, the abbes Biroton and Riphinte. We meet the Duke at 175 year historical intervals - refusing to rejoin the barbarous crusades in 1264, and forced to slaughter disapproving bourgeoisie; investing in new weaponry, most notably the cannon, in defence of his castle in 1439; dabbling in alchemy in 1614; fleeing the French Revolution in 1789. Throughout he hunts, visits the capital, marries woodcutters' young daughters, feasts ferociously, and debates with his clergy.
From the terrifying active Duke, the contemporary story focuses on passive Cidrolin, once wrongly convicted for a crime for which he is still persecuted by an unknown graffiti artist who daubs obscene accusations on his fence every night. Now living on a barge, drinking endless glasses of essence of fennel, he doesn't do much, giving directions to tourists, staring at construction sites or the nearby camping site. Any trip out of the ordinary invariably finds him back where he started; conversations are banal and repetitive. Like the Duke, he has three daughters and sons-in-law, a dead wife and the first name Joachim. He spends most of his time taking siestas, dreaming of the Duke. When the Duke sleeps, usually replete from an enormous meal, he dreams of Cidrolin. Queneau says his book's starting point was the old Chinese saying about a philosopher - When he went to sleep, he dreamt of a butterfly; when he woke up, he wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming of a philosopher.
'Flowers' is, according to the experts, Queneau's most dense and philosophical novel, an intimidating mixture of Chinese philosophy, 'Finnegan's Wake', Plato, Hegel etc. It certainly deals with Big Themes, such as History, Time, Cosmology, Art, the Importance and Interpretation of Dreams. But for the less intellectually alert amongst us (including me), 'Flowers' offers sundry, more accessible pleasures. The comic set-pieces, which can arise from slapstick; bathos and deflated rhetoric; the deadpan recording of absurd conversations, and the absurd convolutions of deadpan conversations. the characters, from whom biography and psychology is deliberately and crucially elided, nevertheless end up being so completely endearing you don't want to leave them. The eulogy to dreams and their subversive power over official history. The detective story element - what crime was Cidrolin accused of? Who is his persector? Why is the watchman of the camp spying on him? Who sabotaged the new flats? Mostly, 'Flowers' is a joy for its language: the historical settings and wide social range of characters allowing for an Augian feast of archaic and obsolete words, jaw-breaking technical terms, slang, puns, neologisms, for all of which Barbara Wright finds delightful and rich equivalents in the wealth of English life and literature. So inventive, audacious and important is her translating, she should really be credited as the book's co-author.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book about dreams, past, present, a barge and a knight., January 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Blue Flowers (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

Think of a book with two main characters and you cannot tell which one is actually living or is just the dream of the other. Well, if it sounds strange it is normal. If you dream of being a butterfly, couldn't it be that in fact it is the butterfly that dreams being you ? This book full of humour, joy and adventures will capture your attention. And if you read it carefully maybe you won't miss a very interesting conception of Time, Life and History that lays behind the lines not so far from the Hegel's one.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lovers of word-plays, puns, jokes & anachronisms, read on:, September 17, 2002

By 

MichaelMills-CPC (Vancouver) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blue Flowers (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) provided a summary of his novel "The Blue Flowers" (1965): "...'I dream that I am a butterfly and pray there is a butterfly dreaming he is me.' The same can be said of the characters in my novel...". The plot wigwags between the bedlam-inducing Duke of Auge (clobbering his way through History at 200 year clips) and the perennially-dozy Cidrolin (fixed to the '60s and his barge on the Seine).

Is one dreaming the other? That is the basic conceit of this lavishly surreal and philosophically-rich novel.

I espeially recommend this title to readers who enjoy books by Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco & Georges Perec.

Did I mention the talking horses?