Children of Clay (Sun & Moon Classics) [Paperback]

Raymond Queneau (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

...full of phonetic spellings, double-entendres, portmanteau words and typographical horseplay. Madeleine Velguth's translation of these oddities is nothing short of heroic. -- The New York Times Book Review, William Ferguson

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Sun & Moon Press; English edition (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557132860
• ISBN-13: 978-1557132864
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #985,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A 20th c. 'Don Quixote' - a big,fat, fantastic, comic novel, August 15, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Children of Clay (Sun & Moon Classics) (Paperback)

Raymond Queneau's works are generally circumscribed in scope, with a small cast of characters and restricted, usually Parisian settings. Their vastness comes from a philosophical play with time, and a casual use of recondite allusion. 'Children of Clay', however, is quite literally encyclopaedic. In the early 1930s, Queneau compiled an anthology of 19th century literary lunatics (cranks, conspiracy theorists, alternative semioticians, cosmologists etc.), which failed to find a publisher. This novel features a provincial, aristocratic headmaster who researches and compiles such an encyclopaedia, huge, dizzying chunks of which prop up the novel, hatstand versions of the universe's beginning jostling with paranoid accounts of what really happened in French history.

'Children of Clay' is many other things too. It is a huge historical novel, set in the France of the late 1920s and early 30s, with the Stock Market Crash, the decline of the aristocracy and the giant industrialists, working class unrest, anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism. The large dramatis personae include the Hachamoth family, the Jewish Baron and his extreme Catholic wife, her foppish younger brother, her beautiful daughters and religious zealot son; Clemence, their disfigured maid; the Gramignis, refugees from Fascist Italy; Robert Bossu, a barowner's son, convinced of his impending greatness in the new France; Chambernac himself, an inept sexual transgressor, who, in a reverse of the Faust story, forces a devil to sign a contract to help him complete his encyclopaedia.

Mirroring his madmen's cosmologies, all these characters ultimately descend from one man, Claye, only glimpsed in one paragraph, committing suicide from a plane. The novel is full of parodic Biblical allusions and restagings (the children of Claye are also the children of clay, i.e. all Mankind), as characters struggle to live in a violent, evil world that God has seemingly abdicated. The novel ranges in space from Italy to the English Channel, by way of the Riviera and Paris, and in time from the French Revolution to the rise of European fascism; or, more precisely, from the creation of the world to, perhaps, its imminent demise.

'Children' is one of those huge, counter-encyclopaedias, like Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy', Swift's 'Tale of the Tub', Melville's 'Moby Dick' or Benjamin's 'Arcades', works that gather together masses of alternative knowledge, marginal, ephemeral, 'useless', trivial, rubbish, countering the encyclopaedic ambition to totalise and classify and explain life. by focusing on what seems unimportant, even mad, these works are perversely never complete, spiralling endlessly, creating a counter-knowledge that can make life, the world, the universe, seem vertiginously new and inexhaustible.

There is so much going on in 'Children', it might be overpowering if it wasn't written in crisp, sprightly, ironic, elliptical comic prose. The novel is contemporary with Marcel Carne's poetic realist films that seemed to prevision the Fall of France, and it shares their profound pessimism, but instead of suffocating in dead ends, Queneau offers us a dazzling collage of possibilities, different ways of looking at the world, all bonkers, but as we try to find a way out of the mess produced by prevailing mindsets, than maybe we could do with a little madness.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Children of Clay, January 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Children of Clay (Sun & Moon Classics) (Paperback)

Children of Clay offers the Master of Literary Illusion's greatest irony, but it ultimately remains unclear if this was Queneau's intention. A principal character in the story, a Monsieur Chambernac, has made it his life's obsession to exhume and bring to light, in a bibliographic encyclopeadia, the works and lives of a collection of obscure, mostly self-published, largely unreadable, delusional 19th century French writers, who have in common only that no interest has ever been taken in their work. M. Chambernac refers to his subject matter as the "literary lunatics." In the end, Chambernac is unable to find a publisher and fails to generate any interest at all in his esoteric encyclopaedia. Answering his own criteria for inclusion in the ranks of literary lunatics, he abandons his manuscript to an unknown author, named Queneau, who requests permission to incorporate the material into a novel he is writing. In fact, as we learn from the introduction, Queneau himself painstakingly researched this material for a similar undertaking and unable to interest a publisher in it, constructed this novel around it in order to get the material into print. As always, Queneau's writing is clever and entertaining, but the various characters and sub-plots fail to cohere adequately to justify the novel form.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Worthy Read, December 21, 2000

By 

"suavis-sum" (Silver Spring, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Children of Clay (Sun & Moon Classics) (Paperback)

While this volume is a difficult read, it is at once tragic yet humourous; thought-provoking yet full of madness; fantasic yet realistic. Anyone who enjoys a though provoking book, touching on almost all aspects of life will enjoy this book.