In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints (no words with the letter x until the final word of the novel), playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale.
As translator James Sallis writes in his informative introduction, "Queneau saw science and literature much in the same light: as games offering marvelous opportunities to make all sorts of connections and play out the consequence of arbitrary rules, but offering no essential knowledge of things in themselves." And as he says of Saint Glinglin, "There's nothing quite like it anywhere."
