Exercises In Style
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.85 (511 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0714542385 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 197 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | French |
DESCRIPTION:
"One of literature's greatest jokes!" according to TG Mueller. Queneau was, among many other things, a brilliant gamester. In this book he takes the most banal of stories and tells it 99 times in 99 different styles. It is a weird book, whose charm grows as you continue. Once you get to the 5th or 6th version of this inan. Five Stars Client d'Amazon Excellent. Thank you.. Taking exception A Customer The book is terrific. But I must take exception to anyone who criticizes a book (favorably or unfavorably) without first having read it. The reviewer from Italy goes so far as to criticize the English translation, which he or she admittedly has not read. I won
“A work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright….Endlessly fascinating and very funny.” Philip Pullman The plot of Exercises in Style is simple: a man gets into an argument with another passenger on a bus. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.. However, this anecdote is told 99 more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations
In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. The result, as translator Barbara Wright writes in her introduction, is "a profound exploration into the possibilities of language." I'd say it's a refresher course of sorts, but it's more like a graduate seminar. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. After all, how many of us are familiar with terms such as litote, alexandrine, apheresis, and epenthesis in the first place? . A twentysomething bus rider with a long, skinny neck and a goofy hat accuses another passenger of trampling his feet; he then grabs an empty seat. The story is told as an official letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English." It's told onomatopoetically, philosophically, telegraphically, and mathem