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"Etudes", The idea for this book came to the author after a performance of Bach's "The Art of the Fugue." Queneau thought it would be interesting to attempt, in prose, a similar exploration of variations on a theme. To that end, he began to write a series of stories exploring forms ranging from the sonnet and the alexandrine to the parody and the lampoon. He retold the same story 99 times, in numbers, dialect, dialogue, pig Latin, spoonerisms, metaphor, officialese, and so on.

The tale is simplicity itself: On a crowded bus, a man accuses a fellow passenger of deliberately jostling him. When a seat opens, he grabs it. Later he is observed on the street being told by a friend "to get an extra button put on [his] overcoat." Anything more is dictated not by the facts but by the requirements of the chosen form.

In general, it was Queneau's ambition, unusual in a Frenchman he said with a smile, to write as unpretentiously and intelligibly as possible. He hoped his exercises in style would "act as a kind of rust-remover to literature, help to rid it of some of its scabs." His purposes certainly were serious enough -- to experiment variously with the possibilities of language, to explore the philosophy of language -- but his means are a fireworks display of witty and entertaining alternatives. Translator Barbara Wright offers an amusing and helpful introduction. Not many studies in linguistics will have you laughing out loud.

"Exercises in Style" is a classic that deserves a place on every writer's shelf.

"Style with style", Humorous and instructive. The story of an altercation on a bus, an apparition with a hat translated from the French with elan.

"Great read", This book is just plain fun to read. I just finished reading it and want to read it again, soon. It is amazing how many different ways the same exact story can be told, and how entertaining it can be over and over again. May not change your life, but you will be highly entertained in the meantime. Cheers.

"An Invitation to Play",
The idea to collect exercises in rhetorical style is not exactly a new one. Classical Greek orators had their progymnasmata as part of the pedagogical curriculum, and a prolific Renaissance writer, like Erasmus in his De Copia, gives 200 stylistic diversions of two very banal sentences. The difference of Raymond Queneau's 20th century Exercises in Style, 1947, lies in the absence of a pedagogical intent and in the ironical distance to esthetic effect. A classical orator typically employs figures to trigger intended effects in his listeners, effects that have certain political, or judicial consequences, or at least show off the eloquence and encyclopedic erudition of the speaker. Queneau, though obviously as erudite as any Renaissance man, conducts rhetorical procedures like chemical experiments: If you fuse a banal story with certain preconceived linguistic styles, how will they react with each other? The results are sometimes predictable, sometimes refreshing, hilarious, very witty, incredibly boring, bombastic, nonsensical, bad.

Queneau's greatest achievement, the surprising linguistic diversity, is derived from a radical axiom: Let everything be language. Mathematics, philosophy, botany, zoology, music, medicine, all are treated for what they indeed are - subjective observation and affected rendering. The combination of a banal story with 99 rhetorical prototypes does not only show the story in different lights, dispels the illusion of its assumed banality, but it also casts an ironic spotlight on those prototypes themselves. Using philosophical terms, Hellenisms or apostrophe to describe a non-incident in a public bus will actually reveal the characteristic quality of such language, a quality we will not become aware of, if we encounter it in its proper realm.

Some rhetorical figures are employed parodistically and in an absolutely literal manner without any regard to poetic propriety. The result is wildly dadaistic; reminiscent, for example, of the verbal excesses in Mozart's "Baesle" letters or the galumphing portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. The demonic energy of ritual language is rediscovered. Obsessive playfulness.

Unfortunately the poetic perfection of a Jabberwocky is definitely absent in Queneau's experiments. This becomes painfully apparent in the "Haiku"--it's 5-7-5--but not a Haiku, and especially in the "Sonnet," a ghastly patchwork indeed, at least in the English translation. A truly artistic style can never be achieved by the mechanistic application of superficial devices. But of course, poetic perfection is not the point of these exercises. Their greatest charm lies in their playfulness and we are invited to play along. "Man plays only where he is man in the fullest sense of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays." [Schiller]



"Question your fragments...", This book, simple in parts, simply genius in others, delves into our perceptions of events filtered through the social archetypes of our thought. Is this a poem? Is this a narrative? Perhaps a list, a simple list. If you read this book, be prepared to think, on many levels, with a keen eye for the experimentation--which then was quite revolutionary--and ask yourself, who now would try such a daring experiment. Very few, I assure you.

The book explores the same story written in 99 different ways, 99 different styles, genres (maybe) and it gives rise to the question, "Could everything be viewed this way?" My trip to the grocer, was it a poem, a haiku maybe? Did my conversation with the butcher and the deli manager really occur as a sonnet? Except that the basic unit of this book isn't really even a story, it's just a fragment, which further adds to the complexity of the issue. Everything we encounter during the day, most of it anyway, is merely fragments of a larger story.

This book asks the question, quietly, and with tongue in cheek, "How do you view those fragments?"

Read this reviews before You buy...

"I wanted to like this, really I did", Some of the variations were pretty amusing. Some, such as the juxtapositions of letters and words according to mathematical formulae, were just tedious and added nothing. The ultimate joke was a bit of a letdown.
This book is easily read and easily forgotten.

"Revolution as fun.", Queneau said he wanted to do for literature what Bach did for music in the Art of fugue. He also wanted to simultaneously clean up the French language, remove its archaic, stuffy conventions, while affirming its elasticity, its variety, its refusal to be contained in anything so deadening as an 'official' language.

Certainly, having read 99 variations on a simple story, all unique, all demonstrating language's protean invention, the traditional one-voice, one tone novel will seem unsatisfactory and lazy.

I know 'Exercises in style' does lots of interesting philosophical and scientific things that are more important than Derrida etc. etc. I like the way a mode of language, simply by functioning, can completely altar a story told in another mode. if you read a story with metaphors, say, you translate the metaphors to see what the writer is 'really' saying. Because you know the story in 'Exercises', you can read the metaphors literally, and another story emerges, hilariously and subversively different from the 'original'.

'Exercises' does this throughout, with slang, poetry, rhetoric, narrative, word games, different voices etc., showing how 99 scientific classifications actually function in declassifying and decentring.

Barbara Wright, along with Scott Moncrieff, was the great translator of the 20th century, and her transposing, rather than translating, of Queneau's work from the French language into an English primer is a miracle. It is a little known fact that 'Exercises' is a detective story, with the solution fittingly revealed in the 99th chapter.

"A joke more than a book", The basic idea is charming, but as I suspected beforehand, it doesn't translate very well into a reading experience. To put it simply, Queneau was wrong when he assumed 99 versions to be "the classic ideal" or something like that. Most of these passages are unreadable, at least all the grammatical exercises.

Having said that, I must admit two things. First, since I don't know French, I had to read a Finnish translation. It's quite clear to me that some of the details must disappear in translation, especially as the Finnish language is not even related to French. (On the other hand, some passages generated specially for the Finnish edition were quite hilarious.)

A more important point is that Queneau can definitely demonstrate the infinite variations in language and storytelling. How many viewpoints can you take on a simple story! The varying description of details was pretty amusing.

In the end, this book is just a joke, even though a clever one. I don't think it has much to do with fictional prose.

"One of the top 10 books of last century.", This French author is one of the wittest but also at the same time one of the finest philosophical minds of our last century. He was a great mathematician but this book is an atypical book.

Apparently Queaneau was influenced heavily by the Diabelli Variations in terms of poking fun at the classical tradition while celebrating it as well. I think that the ingenuity shines through the Barbara Wright translation as well as the clarity of the utterly hilarious and mundane subject. However, this is a forerunner of the rather serious movement-the nouveau roman by focusing on the mundanity and scientificity of life in general.

On the other hand, I think that this author is definitely one of the most underrated authors of our times. He ought to be appreciated a lot more in terms of its own profundity and his abstract viewpoints on life. I love its wit and I would reread it millions of times if I could...

"A Stunning Challenge to Realism", In the 1930s, Raymond Queneau attended a performance of Bach's "The Art of Fugue." Queneau was struck by the fact that Bach's piece, though simple in theme, gave rise to an infinite number of musical variations. This perception became the basis for "Exercises in Style", a literary experiment which stunningly challenges the notion of realism.

Queneau was a polymath, with interests and accomplishments as a novelist, poet, linguist and mathematician. Briefly a member of Andre Breton's Surrealist group, Queneau subsequently joined the "College of Pataphysics" in 1950. Pataphysics was the science of imagainary solutions, a science which originated with the poet and playwrite Alfred Jarry. The Pataphysicians were a tongue-in-cheek group of French intellectuals who didn't take themselves too seriously. At the same time, Queneau was exploring the Pataphysical, however, he was also serving as Director of the prestigious "Encyclopedie de la Pleiade", thus combining the whimsical with the serious. A decade later, Queneau was a founder of "OuLiPo" (an acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Poetentielle" or "Workshop for Potential Literature"). In contrast to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which gave free reign to chance and the unmediated workings of the unconscious, OuLiPo emphasized the systematic and deliberate generation of texts.

"Exercises in Style" is based upon an uninteresting and simple story, a story without any plot, a story that in itself is pointless and boring. Queneau tells this story ninety-nine times, each time using a different variation in the telling. Barbara Wright, the translator of the English edition, notes in her introduction that the variations fall into roughly seven categories. These categories include different types of speech, different types of written prose, different poetic styles, and different grammatical and rhetorical forms. Another category are variations which are told in the form of character sketches through language (e.g., reactionary, biased, abusive, etc.). Queneau, in this fashion, demonstrates the fluidity of language, the variability in the ways that language can describe reality. As one critic succinctly and correctly stated, "Exercises in Style" demonstrates "the impossibility of realism in any unitary sense."

Queneau wanted "Exercises in Style" translated into English and, unike most literary texts, this particular text loses little in translation. While Barbara Wright's translation is outstanding, she also rightly notes that "the story as such doesn't matter, [nor] does the particular language [in which] it is written." What matters, and what "Exercises in Style" brilliantly illustrates, is that a simple story can be expressed in an infinite variety of literary and linguistic styles, that the transformation of reality into language is susceptible of manifold permutations. This is the genius of Queneau's text, a genius which makes this book a minor classic of modern literature.