The Blue Flowers – Raymond Queneau

As every good (continental) European middle school student, I’ve spent long weeks reading Queneau’s Exercises in Style – pages and pages of the same 15-20 lines repeated using different adjectives, or a different tone, or different punctuation, whatever. Probably that’s the reason why I hated him to begin with.

The Blue Flowers is not a bad book, but when you have Calvino (and you already don’t particularly like his dreamlike knightly stories) it just seems kind of silly. Yes, the story is formally perfectly framed, but to me that’s just not enough to make it a seminal work in the French literature of the 20^th century. The book, just like the life of CIdrolin, is really quite cute. And there is a problem when the best thing you can say about a book is that it’s “really cute”.