Odile [Paperback]

Raymond Queneau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1992

novel, tr Carol Sanders

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the author's early works, this charming, semi-autobiographical novel was written before Queneau developed the highly intellectualized style that became his trademark. Like Queneau, who became involved with the Surrealists in the mid-'20s after military service in North Africa, the narrator, Roland Travy, joins a group headed by a flamboyant individual named Anglares (a disguised portrait of surrealist Andre Breton). Queneau takes deliciously funny stabs at his "fellow revolutionaries of the unconscious," describing their flirtation with communism and, ultimately, Travy's break with the group. In the meantime, Travy marries Odile, a sunny but flakey young woman from a similar bourgeois background, but their relationship is too bizarre even for the Surrealists. Written in a cool detached style, full of witticisms and puns, this is Queneau at his most accessible.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"A marvelous sendup of the Surrealists of the late 1920s and early 1930s as well as a moving love story. . . . Both a madcap roman a clef . . . and a parable about the search for spiritual equilibrium and human meaning." -- Kirkus Reviews 10-15-88

"The ear is as finely tuned as ever. Indeed there is a marked drift towards the serieux, because that is exactly appropriate, not only to the magisterial suffisance of Anglares, but also to Travy's own unwitting pomposity." -- Times Literary Supplement 11-29-91

"We always feel good reading a Queneau novel; he is the least depressing of the moderns, the least heavy, with something Mozartian about the easy, self-pleasing flow of his absurd plots." -- John Updike, New Yorker 7-4-88

"[Queneau's work is] characterized by a playful spirit and an intelligence unmatched by any of his contemporaries. . . . How can anyone not love Queneau?" -- New Orleans Times-Picayune

Any discussion of contemporary French literature inevitably includes an analysis of the social and political climate amrounding the creation of a, particular book. The work of Raymond Queneau is no exception. Odik, first published in France in 1937, reflects Queneau's commitment to certain tenets of the Surrealist movement along with his interest in the Communist Party. Yet this is not a didactic book. Instead, it is a lively and entertaining story, full of puns and word play and inside jokes as well as a moving account of one's man search for meaning. Roland Travy considers himself a theoretical mathernatician, a solitary scholar working on esoteric and incommunicable problems. Disoriented by World War L plunged into the chaotic world of the Parisian intelligensia in the 1930s, he becomes involved with two vastly different groups of people. Here Queneau pits ineffectual intellectuals, obsessed with a multitude of meaningless but fashionable pursuits, against the world of garnblers, pimps, and prostitutes living precariously on the edge. Travy meeds Odile, a woman of questionable virtue. They marry, but live apart. Escaping to Greece, Travy gains a new perspective. He returns to Odile only when he recognizes the silliness of his lifestyle and the need for love in his life. What makes OdiL- so remarkable is the density of the text, the multiple layers of both illusion and implication. Caught in a Kafkaesque predicament, Travy is able to think, "Guys like me, communists-to-be, shouldn't make conversation with a magistrate." Of Greece Travy says, "It was only after a week that we got around to seeing the sights, our determination to be modem having been satisfied by this display of indifference." Humor and pathos are artfully intertwined, with Queneau always in control of the sometimes absurd, often whimsically thin, plot. Carol Sanders has done a wonderful job of translating what might have been a very difficult work. The text flows effortlessly from lists of proselytizing groups ("...the unadulterated asymmetric revolutionaries, the intolerant polypsychists, the proMussolinian anti-fascist terrorists of the extreme left...") to poetically simple confessions C'I was pretending to be a mathematician. I thought sand castles were algebraic constructions and puzzles were geometric theorems."). The text notes she provides are thorough and extremely helpful in understanding Queneau's ambiguous perception of the world. All in all Odilee is an extraordinary production, a book to be treasured. The Dalkey Archive Press is to be commended for bringing this fine work to the public's attention. -- From Independent Publisher --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: French & European Pubns (October 1, 1992)
• ISBN-10: 0686546792
• ISBN-13: 978-0686546795
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,101,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars THE STRANGER FOR HAPPY PEOPLE, July 31, 2001

By 

Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Odile (Paperback)

Roland Travy states that he was not born until his twenty-first year. It is while in the French army that year that he sees an Arab man gazing at the land and sky. Travy likens him to a poet or a philsopher and it is this image that begins to awaken his true inner being. Arriving back in Paris he falls in with Communist bohemian artists, political anarchists, pimps, and thugs. This is also where he meets Odile. In the end he accepts who he really is.

Queneau does a brillant job of showing the absurdity and humor in everything that happens in Odile. From the beginning there's a laugh when Roland states that his fellow soldiers "are really good guys and all capable no doubt of making really good butchers". The bohemians are seen as ineffectual idiots more interested in preaching to their own circle of disciples than improving the common people. They're the same posers you see nowadays in cafes preaching to each other about the sad state of humanity but having no effect upon their fate. Roland sees all this but goes along with the different movements, at least superficially. At one point he visits a seance where the spirit of Lenin is summoned and as he walks out he comments how pathetic the spectacle was. Even Roland is guilty, spending 8-12 hours a day in his apartment working with mathematical problems. He has spent years in the belief that he is a latter day Isacc Newton or an Einstein who will discover the true nature of reality through mathematics and physics. He's also too proud to admit he's in love with Odile. It wouldn't be in keeping with his image if anyone knew he was in love. At the end of the book he has a vision of what he truly is and he snaps out of the childish games of his adulthood.

This novel is funny, and I mean that in the humorous sense. The characters are a little weak except for Roland but that's to be expected in an autobiographical work. The beginning and the end of the novel pack more punch than the middle. The crisis of identity is equal to The Stranger in some passages but here we have a happy ending. A realization of meaning. Or IS it a happy ending? Roland decides to live a "normal" life and dismisses any rebellion against society as a childish act of defiance and a losing battle. You have to be assimilated sooner or later.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A great writer's most autobiographical novel., May 25, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Odile (French Literature) (Paperback)

This 1937 novella is an autobiographical work, transposing, through the narrator-hero Roland Travy, Queneau's disjointed life in 1920s Paris - his rejection of his bourgeois background; his living in Paris; his military service; his struggles with his art.

Travy, returned from two years military service in a mostly clerical position, subsists in Paris on an allowance from a gay, ex-colonial uncle, conducting obscure mathematical research, lost in a fug of solipsism, passivity and a lack of self-esteem. He drifts in with a group of petty criminals, where he meets another bourgeois abscondee, Odile, and, with equal passivity, gets involved with the Infrapsychics, an eccentric group of intellectuals who hope to provoke revolution through liberating the unconscious and the irrational.

For such a small book, 'Odile' is many things: a damning account of French colonialism in North Africa - the opening scenes depicting the crushing of a local rebellion in Morocco are frightening precisely because of their un-Tolstoyan vagueness; a satire/critique/fond evocation of political and cultural life in 1920s Paris, all the groups, -isms, infighting, experiments, flirting with Communism - in particular the Surrealists, to whom Queneau was briefly affiliated (he married Andre Breton's sister), relentlessly lampooning their arbitrary games and theories, while admitting the creative debt he owes them; a love story, postponed by a hero who 'despises' bourgeois notions like 'love' and 'marriage'; and the bildungsroman of an artist who goes along with whatever comes his way, be it the army, the Infrapsychics, criminals, Communists etc., always unhappy, but never taking the active step thta might transform his, or reconcile him to, life.

Fans of Queneau's more linguistically playful works like 'Zazie' and 'Exercises of Style' might find 'Odile' disappointing. As a love story, the figure of Odile is too idealised and symbolic to be affecting; the satire on Surrealism and its cultural milieu is too laboured and obvious to be laugh-out-loud (although this might be a problem with the flat translation: Queneau needs someone as recklessly inventive as Barbara Wright to survive in English) - there is fun to be had in recognising the fictionalised Breton, Aragon, Eluard etc., and there is an Alice-like court hearing, in which the magistrate starts interrogating Travy about Fermat's last theorem and the 'excluded middle'; the narrative of maturity is blunted by the narrator's rather unsympathetic personality, even if his aesthetics of mathematics is frequently, to this ignoramous, enrapturing, and his struggle to record his memories, imperfectly exploring the landscape of his mind with as many black holes as open spaces, is very poignant.

'Odile' has been called 'gentle', but what is most immediately apparent is the sadness and emptiness behind the logorrheic comedy. Where 'Odile' succeeds is formally and philosophically. It lacks the set-pieces of 'Zazie', but there is the same dizzying, elliptical style, what Gilbert Adair calls Queneau's 'jump cuts', the same telescoping and contracting of narrative time and space, that can be disorienting and liberating.

The novel opens with a beautiful paragraph about the narrator's (re?)birth, at 21, walking down a muddy road skirting a North African town, the rain just stopped, the last clouds caught fleeing in a puddle. Straight ahead of him stands an Arab, possibly a nobleman, a philosopher or a poet, staring at something. What that something might be, for the narrator, the reader, the novelist, the book, is what 'Odile' movingly explores.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very moving piece of art, June 4, 2009

By 

Annie in wonderland (Florida) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Odile (French Literature) (Paperback)

I'm a big big fan of Godard, and as soon as I knew his movie Band of Outsiders was inspired in some things by this novel (including Anna Karina character's name), I immediately ordered it.

This book has been one of my most enjoyable reads. It's beautiful, clever and ironic. It's also very funny when you know at least a little bit (like me) of the Surrealism movement, especially about Andre Breton.