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Skin of Dreams

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This book's French title actually translates as 'Far From Reuil' (a suburb of Paris), but both are appropriate. 'Skin of Dreams' relates the adventures of Jacques L'Aumone, schoolboy; illegitimate son of a nobleman poet; cineaste; chemical engineer; theatre director; extra; unrequited lover; vagrant; saint; documentary filmmaker; tropical adventurer; world-famous film-star.

The novel sets up a division between the 'real' world of 1920s Reuil and the cinema-generated dreams of the young Jacques, who wishes himself a cowboy, composer etc. Distinctions between the two soon vanish, with fantasy becoming reality, or reality merely seeming fantastic (the plot has the circularity, recurrence and metamorphosis of characters, situations and motifs, the speedy rush of incident of a dream, but refuses to declare itself as such).

This goes beyond the familiar blurring of reality and fantasy, and is part of the Surrealist project of unearthing the fluid, transformmative, fetishistic and strange inherent in the monolithc everyday, with its repressions of reality, family, gender, etc.

This was a pertinent desire in the Occupation during which the novel was written: the novel is also a very funny parody of the existentialism that was emerging as the era's credo (one of the characters suffers from a 'posh' form of asthma called 'ontalgia').

Like Godard's universe in a coffee cup, the novel's metaphysical reach encompasses lice and the stars. For all its linguistic and philosophical enquiry, however, it should not be forgotten that Queneau has, in miniature, a Proustian facility with the extended set-piece - Jacques becoming the cowboy he imitates on screen; Jacques trying to tantalise an elderly Humbert into selling a valuable medicine; Jacques' abandoned wife relating her history - and a cast of characters that, again like Proust, are as vivid and human as they are protean and elusive.