Poet, novelist, and humorist, born in Le Havre, NW France. He studied at the Sorbonne, and in 1924 became involved with the Surrealists, along with Pierre Naville. After working as a reporter, he was appointed a reader for the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, becoming director in 1955. The best of his poetry is contained in Les Ziaux (1943), Petite Cosmogonie Portative (1950), and Si tu t'imagines (1952). The vision of an absurd world is the format for his novels, including Le Chiendent (1933), Zazie dans le métro (1959) probably his best-known work (filmed 1960), Les Fleurs bleues (1965), and Le Vol d'Icare (1968). Often self-reflective, they anticipate some of the devices of the nouveau roman.
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Raymond Queneau (February 21, 1903 – October 25, 1976) was a French poet and novelist.
Biography
Born in Le Havre, Normandy, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot.
Queneau performed military service as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–1926.
Queneau spent much of his life working for French publisher Gallimard, where he began as a reader in 1938, rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956.
During this time, Queneau also acted as a translator, notably for Amos Tutuola's Palm Wine Drinkard (l'Ivrogne dans la brousse) in 1953.
As an author, Queneau came to general attention in France with the publication in 1959 of his novel Zazie dans le métro, and with the film adaptation by Louis Malle in 1960 at the height of the Nouvelle Vague movement in French film.
Juliette Greco made popular his song 'Si tu t'imagines.'
Even before the founding of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) in 1960, Queneau was attracted to mathematics as a source of inspiration.
One of Queneau's most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man seeing the same stranger twice in one day. A graphical homage to Queneau, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, a graphical story adaptation of the book's concept by Matt Madden, was published in 2005.
Queneau is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essone outside Paris.
Queneau and Surrealists
In 1924 Queneau met and briefly joined the Surrealists, but never really shared in the methods of automatic writing or Surrealist ultra-left politics. Yet he seems to have understood, and accepted the fact that, for Queneau, it would be difficult to avoid Simone, since Queneau married her sister, Janine, in 1928. That year, while Breton left Simone for Suzanne, Simone ran around France, sometimes in the company of Janine and Queneau. In 1930, the year Crevel, Eluard, Aragon and Breton joined French Communist party, Queneau participated in Un cadavre (A Corpse, 1930), a vehemently anti-Breton pamphlet co-written by Bataille, Leiris, Prévert, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Baron, J.-A.
Michel Leiris describes, in Brisees, how he first met Queneau in 1924, while vacationing in Nemours with Andre Masson, Armand Salacrou and Juan Gris.
For Boris Souvarine’s La Critique sociale (1930-34) Q mostly wrote brief reviews. he also helped with the passages on Engels and mathematical dialectic for Bataille’s article “A critique of the foundations of Hegelian dialectic”
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