Exercises in Style

 
 
Exercises in Style

by Raymond Queneau
translated by Barbara Wright

New Directions

1947, reprinted 1981
 

 

Exercises in Style is a collection of vignettes or flash fictions, with a twist. Each chapter tells the same story, but tells it in a different way.

 
The narrator is on a crowded bus and sees a young man with a long neck and a silly hat. The young man complains that his neighbor has been stepping on his toes on purpose. Then the young man sees an empty seat and rushes to sit down. Later, the narrator is back on the same bus and spots the same young man out the window, where a friend is advising him to add a button to his coat.

 
Queneau tries out as many variations as he can think of - as a business letter, as a haiku, a sonnet, a folk song, courtroom testimony, a comedic skit. He uses different narrators - the young man himself, the accused neighbor, a cranky reactionary, a woman. He tells versions that use as many as possible of certain kinds of metaphors or turns of phrase, colors, animals, the five senses.

 
Some are nearly unreadable, like when he drops the first, last, or middle half of every word, or when he adds an extra letter to the front, back, or middle of each. Translator Barbara Wright replaces a few with eqivalents, like a phoenetic text of a British person doing a terrible French accent instead of the reverse, or Cockney rhyming slang instead of medieval French peasant talk.

 
Although nothing if consequence happens in the story, and every chapter tells the same story in a different voice, Queneau's wit and humor keeps it moving at a good pace and keeps it from getting boring. That said, while you would be hard pressed to spend more than an hour and a half of reading time on this one, I also can't imagine trying to finish it in a single session, or even in one day.