Pierrot Mon Ami (French Literature Series) [Paperback]

Raymond Queneau (Author), Barbara Wright (Translator), Inez Hedges (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1989 | Series: French Literature Series

"Pierrot Mon Ami was perhaps Queneau's masterpiece . . . This unlikely guru exerted a major influence on a new avant-garde (notably on Georges Perec, who was devoted to him). But if there was a sage in Queneau he never imparted his wisdom more touchingly than in Pierrot Mon Ami."—Times Literary Supplement

Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity.

This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau's principle translator).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pierrot is a Chaplinesque figure who works at a series of marginal jobs for an amusement park, and competes with his friend Paradis for the affections of the owner's daughter. "Originally published in France in 1942 and in England in 1950, this novel's pared down, often vulgar language is supplemented by highly inventive word plays and snippets of philosophy," said PW .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A brilliant, quirky novel by a French novelist whose reputation continues to grow in America. (Kirkus )

Loopily clever . . . inexhaustibly inventive, unremittingly disconcerting, overflowing with subversive energy, surrealistic wit, and rough-edged whimsy . . . All [of Barbara Wright's] translations, including this one, are triumphs of ingenuity. After reading her English version of Pierrot Mon Ami, I raced through Queneau's original in delighted admiration . . . It is full of sentences which dizzy the reader with the hilarity of their close-packed variety of tone: low argot sabotages an elaborate metaphor in elevated language like Harpo Marx goosing Margaret Dumont . . . Queneau's books deserve a wider audience than they have yet won in this country. Anyone who has read one of Wright's translations has probably read them all, and will go out and get this one without needing to be urged. But if you haven't read one already, Pierrot Mon Ami would be an excellent introduction. I must warn you that a taste for Queneau can escalate quite easily into an addiction, but you shouldn't let that stop you, because most good book stores here offer three or four of Wright's translations in paperback, and he's even more fun to re-read than to read. (Cityweek )

Raymond Queneau's books are ambiguous fairylands in which scenes of everyday life are mingled with a melancholy that is ageless. Though they are not without bitterness, their author seems always to set his face against conclusions, and to be moved by a kind of horror of seriousness. 'Foolishness,' according to Flaubert, 'consists of wanting to reach a conclusion.' One can imagine those words as the epigraph to Queneau's Pierrot Mon Ami. (Albert Camus )

A jaunty little tale of unusual verbal dexterity . . . [T]he inventive vernacular of his books . . . is of course in no way ordinary. (The Guardian )

Pierrot Mon Ami is a poem on chance and destiny, on the relationship between what should have happened and what actually does happen . . . Pierrot represents one of the main types of the Queneau hero: the simpleton who is a natural poet and who passes through the world without understanding it, without seeking to understand it. In an absurd and meaningless universe this is the most rational and least foolish of all possible attitudes: the taking of life as it comes, without thought of the morrow, and with the resulting freedom to enjoy its simple pleasures. (Martin Esslin )

A comic masterpiece. (Hollins Critic )

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. (The New Yorker )

Bizarre . . . entertaining fiction. (Bloomsbury Review )

I must underline here the importance of the novels of Raymond Queneau, whose texture often and whose movement always are strictly those of the imagination. (Alain Robbe-Grillet )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (September 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564783979
• ISBN-13: 978-1564783974
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #876,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very important book in the development of modern fiction., June 20, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pierrot Mon Ami (Paperback)

'Pierrot mon ami' was written around the same time as Celine's 'Guignol's Band', and, like that controversial classic, features a passive innocent on the margins of society, with carnies, circus acts, petty ex-criminals, mad artists - at one point, like Ferdinand, Pierrot becomes an assistant to a fake fakir.

'Pierrot' has slightly more reference to the Occupation than Queneau's other novels in the period - a fire razing a giant amusement arcade is said to have been started by one of the attractions, burning chairoplanes; an uproarious journey with a boar and a chimp is arguably a figure for anti-Semitism; a bottle of Vichy water is pronounced disgusting.

Another point of reference might be Sartre's famous short story 'The Wall'. Pierrot's imprisonment may be more metaphorical than actual - he is condemned to walk the same streets every day; on the one occasion he leaves, the rest of the book's cast go with him, while the strangers he meet used to work in the area - but it provokes the same Nietzchean laughter.

I point this out to show how much 'Pierrot' is of its time - Queneau is often dismissed for refusing to 'engage'. In any case, 'Pierrot' is a supremely anti-Nazi book, with its shifting perspectives, its formal games, its narrative and semantic gaps, its instability of character, refusing the reader the reassurance of fixity or authority.

But if 'Pierrot' is of its time, it's also ahead of it. Together with Nabokov's 'The Real life of Sebastian Knight' and Borges' Ficciones, Queneau was at this moment pioneering anti-detective fiction, that genre later populated by Pynchon, Calvino, Eco, Sciascia et al, where the conventional rules of the detective story are invoked (a mystery, investigation), but its ideological function is displaced (resolution, restoration of social order).

'Pierrot' is full of mysteries - who was the woman Jojo Mouilliminche died for? Who was the Paldovian prince whose tomb Mouzzenergues faithfully curates? Who burned the Uni-Park where philosophers pay and brawl to see brief glimpses of female flesh, the hero is sporadically employed, and where he meets the boss's daughter who will sleep with everyone but him (well, he is a pierrot)? Are these things connected? There is a proliferation of clues, coincidences and patterns, but, perhaps because of the Occupation, there is less faith in the restorative powers of the genre.

Instead of fixing things in their proper place, 'Pierrot' is a book that celebrates play - every character is in some way connected to performance, and their every appearance is like a 'bit' or 'act' on the novel's stage.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The risks of chance, May 23, 2000

By 

Ben Singleton "Cruscotto" (Florence, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pierrot Mon Ami (Paperback)

Pierrot turns away from CHOICE to follow coincidence, chance meetings, crossed paths, to follow, dream-like, the destiny that will take him accross France with a tame monkey and a wild boar... A book dedicated to the peace of accepting the direction life sets us, instead of stiding, giant steps, to determine a false life for ourselves.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Friend--Pierrot is mon ami., January 8, 2009

By 

Wiley Coyote (Norfolk, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pierrot Mon Ami (Paperback)

This is my favorite book. Pierrot charms me more than any other character in literature, and his influence upon my growing life surpasses even that of Holden Caulfield. Pierrot is the inspiration for many of my own characters in my newly blossoming career in writing.
This book is charming, but not without tragedy and regret. It will surely touch any reader who remembers his or her own days of disillusioned youth. Anyone who remembers their days of financial dependence upon their parents or their days of becoming themselves financial independent will relate to Pierrot's loneliness and at the same time find a role model and a fantasy in his lackadaisical yet uplifting life. In this book you will find a new appriciation of life.
This is a book in which you will find a friend, a day-dream, and an inspiration.