ABSTRACT
Raymond Queneau was involved with nearly every avant-garde in twentieth-century French literature, as a founder, fellow traveler or dissident, yet his extensive and heterogeneous oeuvre stubbornly resists classification. Linked to Surrealism, to the College of Pataphysics, to the New Novel and, towards the end of his life, especially to OuLiPo (the Workshop of Potential Literature), the polymathic Queneau struck out in several directions at once and worked in a variety of genres, often in the same book. It is a bewildering, jocular, sometimes poignant, sometimes overplayed utopian novel comprising monologues, dialogues, epic verse, pastiche, and more-or-less straightforward narratives recounted from a variety of viewpoints. Increasingly interested in cavernicoles, this tormented autodidact is intimidated by his father's presence in his everyday thoughts and thus delves into a study of "the dawn of the Inhuman." Pierre Albert-Birot eventually returns to Home Town, where his ichthyological discoveries are greeted with troubled looks.
