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| Exercises in Style | 
| Author: Raymond Queneau
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 41134
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 197
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0811207897
Dewey Decimal Number: 848.91207
EAN: 9780811207898
ASIN: 0811207897
Publication Date: February 1981
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Amazon.com Review
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. Later, in a park, a friend encourages the same man to reorganize the buttons on his overcoat. In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, this determinedly pointless scenario unfolds 99 times in twice as many pages. Originally published in 1947 (in French), these terse variations on a theme are a wry lesson in creativity. 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 mathematically. 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. After all, how many of us are familiar with terms such as litote, alexandrine, apheresis, and epenthesis in the first place?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Etudes August 9, 2008
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 April 27, 2008
Humorous and instructive. The story of an altercation on a bus, an apparition with a hat translated from the French with elan.
Great read April 20, 2008
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 April 22, 2007
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... October 27, 2006
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?"
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