Exercises in Style [Paperback]

Raymond Queneau (Author), Barbara Wright (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1981 | ISBN-10: 0811207897 | ISBN-13: 978-0811207898 | Edition: 2

“A work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright….Endlessly fascinating and very funny.” —Philip Pullman

The plot of Exercises in Style is simple: a man gets into an argument with another passenger on a bus. However, this anecdote is told 99 more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A twentysomething bus rider with a long, skinny neck and a goofy hat accuses another passenger of trampling his feet; he then grabs an empty seat. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. The story is told as an official letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English." It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathematically. The result, as translator Barbara Wright writes in her introduction, is "a profound exploration into the possibilities of language." I'd say it's a refresher course of sorts, but it's more like a graduate seminar. After all, how many of us are familiar with terms such as litote, alexandrine, apheresis, and epenthesis in the first place?

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 2 edition (February 17, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811207897
• ISBN-13: 978-0811207898
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of literature's greatest jokes! July 7, 1998

By T. Mueller

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Queneau was, among many other things, a brilliant gamester. In this book he takes the most banal of stories and tells it 99 times in 99 different styles. It is a weird book, whose charm grows as you continue. Once you get to the 5th or 6th version of this inane tale, you begin to laugh and gasp and don't stop until the end. Like all good jokes, it is more than a joke. If you delight in language, read this book. If you do not delight in launguage, this book will teach you to. I have read the original French version, and Barbara Wright has stayed true to it in this wonderful translation. Don't miss this gem!

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Challenge to Realism July 31, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

In the 1930s, Raymond Queneau attended a performance of Bach's "The Art of Fugue." Queneau was struck by the fact that Bach's piece, though simple in theme, gave rise to an infinite number of musical variations. This perception became the basis for "Exercises in Style", a literary experiment which stunningly challenges the notion of realism.

Queneau was a polymath, with interests and accomplishments as a novelist, poet, linguist and mathematician. Briefly a member of Andre Breton's Surrealist group, Queneau subsequently joined the "College of Pataphysics" in 1950. Pataphysics was the science of imagainary solutions, a science which originated with the poet and playwrite Alfred Jarry. The Pataphysicians were a tongue-in-cheek group of French intellectuals who didn't take themselves too seriously. At the same time, Queneau was exploring the Pataphysical, however, he was also serving as Director of the prestigious "Encyclopedie de la Pleiade", thus combining the whimsical with the serious. A decade later, Queneau was a founder of "OuLiPo" (an acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Poetentielle" or "Workshop for Potential Literature"). In contrast to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which gave free reign to chance and the unmediated workings of the unconscious, OuLiPo emphasized the systematic and deliberate generation of texts.

"Exercises in Style" is based upon an uninteresting and simple story, a story without any plot, a story that in itself is pointless and boring. Queneau tells this story ninety-nine times, each time using a different variation in the telling. Barbara Wright, the translator of the English edition, notes in her introduction that the variations fall into roughly seven categories. These categories include different types of speech, different types of written prose, different poetic styles, and different grammatical and rhetorical forms. Another category are variations which are told in the form of character sketches through language (e.g., reactionary, biased, abusive, etc.). Queneau, in this fashion, demonstrates the fluidity of language, the variability in the ways that language can describe reality. As one critic succinctly and correctly stated, "Exercises in Style" demonstrates "the impossibility of realism in any unitary sense."

Queneau wanted "Exercises in Style" translated into English and, unike most literary texts, this particular text loses little in translation. While Barbara Wright's translation is outstanding, she also rightly notes that "the story as such doesn't matter, [nor] does the particular language [in which] it is written." What matters, and what "Exercises in Style" brilliantly illustrates, is that a simple story can be expressed in an infinite variety of literary and linguistic styles, that the transformation of reality into language is susceptible of manifold permutations. This is the genius of Queneau's text, a genius which makes this book a minor classic of modern literature.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Revolution as fun. April 11, 2001

By darragh o'donoghue

Format:Paperback

Queneau said he wanted to do for literature what Bach did for music in the Art of fugue. He also wanted to simultaneously clean up the French language, remove its archaic, stuffy conventions, while affirming its elasticity, its variety, its refusal to be contained in anything so deadening as an 'official' language.

Certainly, having read 99 variations on a simple story, all unique, all demonstrating language's protean invention, the traditional one-voice, one tone novel will seem unsatisfactory and lazy.

I know 'Exercises in style' does lots of interesting philosophical and scientific things that are more important than Derrida etc. etc. I like the way a mode of language, simply by functioning, can completely altar a story told in another mode. if you read a story with metaphors, say, you translate the metaphors to see what the writer is 'really' saying. Because you know the story in 'Exercises', you can read the metaphors literally, and another story emerges, hilariously and subversively different from the 'original'.

'Exercises' does this throughout, with slang, poetry, rhetoric, narrative, word games, different voices etc., showing how 99 scientific classifications actually function in declassifying and decentring.

Barbara Wright, along with Scott Moncrieff, was the great translator of the 20th century, and her transposing, rather than translating, of Queneau's work from the French language into an English primer is a miracle. It is a little known fact that 'Exercises' is a detective story, with the solution fittingly revealed in the 99th chapter.