Queneau, Raymond

Queneau, Raymond (rāmôN` kĕnō`), 1903–76, French author and critic. He was an advocate of surrealism during the middle and late 1920s. Queneau is best known for his manipulations of style and language and his use of street slang in literary works. He often parodied traditional literary forms, as in his pastiche Exercices de style (1947). His novels include Le Chiendent (1933; tr. The Bark Tree, 1968), Les Enfants du Limon (1938; tr. Children of Clay, 1998), Un Rude Hiver (1940; tr. A Hard Winter, 1948), Pierrot, mon ami (1943), Le Dimanche de la vie [the Sunday of life] (1952), and the comic bestseller Zazie dans le Métro (1959; tr. Zazie, 1960). He also wrote a great deal of poetry (see his Selected Poems, tr. 1970), and many of his novels contain extended verse passages.

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Queneau, Raymond

(born Feb. 21, 1903, Le Havre, France—died Oct. 25, 1976, Paris) French author. After working as a reporter, he became a reader for the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, a scholarly edition of past and present classical authors; by 1955 he was its director. Verbal play, black humour, pessimism, and a derisive posture toward authority appear often in his more than 30 works of prose and poetry, which include the novels Zazie dans le métro (1959; film, 1960), perhaps his best-known work, and The Blue Flowers (1965).