The Blue Flowers

Reviews

"Raymond Queneau's The Blue Flowers: one of the weirdest and wildest rides in literature. With as much colloquial language as Joyce and Pound, as much bawdy humor as Shakespeare and Chaucer, and as much puzzle-like wordplay as any of his fellow Oulipo brethren, Queneau gives us an idiosyncratic masterpiece to enjoy, to study, to wrestle with for the ages." — Tyler Malone, Literary Hub

"Queneau’s role of combined scientist and pataphysician makes him seem more clearly than ever the forerunner of those other disintegrators of language: Ionesco and Beckett." — The New York Times

"When it came to the novel, Raymond Queneau imagined a kind that would advance along strict compositional lines, like poetry or architecture, yet upset all expectation. Take The Blue Flowers, published in 1973 and now happily reissued by New Directions." — The New Yorker

"In our century Queneau is a unique example of a wise and intelligent writer, who always goes against the grain of the dominant tendencies of his age and of French culture in particular—and he combines this with an endless need to invent and test possibilities. The Blue Flowers makes fun of history, denying its progress and reducing it to the substance of daily existence." — Italo Calvino